Samsung, stepping up to the 500GB per platter level, has chosen not to follow Western Digital and Seagate's 2TB hard drive lead and restricted itself to a 1.5TB capacity.

Seagate has tweaked its perpendicular magnetic recording technology to attain the 500GB/3.5-inch hard drive platter level. But by using three platters, instead of the four needed for a 2TB drive, Samsung claims it puts more ticks in the green box than other suppliers, claiming its F2EG drive is 40 per cent lower in power consumption in idle mode and 45 per cent lower in reading/writing mode than competing drives.

Its spin on why it is using just three platters and eschewing the 2TB capacity level is that a 3-platter drive has fewer heads - six rather than eight - making it more mechanically reliable, and needs less power to start up, keep spinning and move its head stack.

This seems to be a neat piece of marketing to differentiate Samsung from its competitors in the 3.5-inch, SATA, 500GB/platter product space which is the mainstream capacity hard disk drive sector.

It says the drive is cool and quiet as well as green, but doesn't supply any numbers to show how cool and quiet it is.

The F2EG spins at 7,200rpm, uses a 3Gbit/s SATA interface, has 16 or 32MB of cache, and is intended for use in home media PCs, external HDDs, set-top boxes and personal NAS (network-attached storage). It's available in 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB versions with $149 being the list price for the 1.5TB model. ®