Samsung announced today its one terabyte (TB) F1 Series hard disk drive, which features the world?s highest recording density in a 3.5" hard disk drive using only 3 disks.

Samsung's F1 series is being introduced today at the company's storage press conference in New York City.

The F1 drives employ a host of proprietary technologies to achieve low power consumption and high performance. Quiet operation is ensured via Samsung's NoiseGuard and SilentSeek technologies, which reduce overall noise and vibration emanating from the drive. PMR recording with Samsung's Flying on Demand (FOD) head technology ensures improved recording stability over changing temperature ranges.

The F1 Series drive features a 334GB per-platter capacity, a 7200RPM spin speed, a 32MB cache, and up to a 1.2 million hour MTBF. It features a SATA 3Gb/s interface with NCQ and many additional SATA features. The F1 Series offers improved performance with SHOS based firmware, vibration tolerance with a rotational vibration sensor and lower power consumption with an optimized SOC.

Samsung's SpinPoint F1 Series is currently shipping with a $399 MSRP.

New hybrid drives

At the same event, Samsung showcased its new 160GB hybrid MH80 disc drive, which includes 256MB of flash memory. The inclusion of flash memory in the new drive allows for a lower-power operation and greater reliability, since the actual hard disk drive itself won't need to spin as often.

In addition, it means speedier boot and application launch times. Samsung claims that the new drives are 50 percent faster than traditional hard drives.

"First there was notebook 2.5-inch HDDs with 2MB DRAM caches. Then 8MB DRAM caches were introduced to improve performance. The 256MB Flash memory cache included in Samsung's hybrid HDD technology is the next major step in performance for 2.5-inch HDDs," said Andy Higginbotham, Samsung Semiconductor's director of hard drive sales and marketing.

The MH80 hybrid will be available at a suggested price of $299.