This drive is simply great for the the amount it costs. It's very fast, and although it might not be as quiet as some drives out there it certainly isn't noisy.
Don't know what a previous reviewer is on about with it being OEM. This simply means it doesn't come in a fancy box with cables and has nothing to do with being a 'grey import'. It comes with exactly the same 3 yr warranty as the non-OEM drive. No idea where the other guy got his information from.
This has been the A-List desktop HDD in the PC Pro magazine since July 2010, "Sustaining an average write speed of 208MB/sec writing and 138MB/sec reading within Windows." They reckon it's a bit noisy, but I haven't heard a peep out of the two I bought for a software mirror in Win 7. If you're thinking of hanging them off an Adaptec SATA RAID expansion card I'd steer clear of them as Adaptec are highly fussy about what they consider to be suitable for RAID. They like 'Enterprise' (big bucks) HDD's on their cards, but you shoudn't have any trouble with these if you're using a desktop MOBO built-in RAID chip. These came double-jiffy bagged in their hard plastic factory packets (OEM package) but if building PC's is you're thing the lack of nice consumer packaging won't bother you! Only pain for me was it took 4 days for them to arrive from Play and I would have paid extra for express delivery but it wasn't an option.
The Samsung F3 is a great drive, very quiet and fast for a non SSD, however it's a 'gray import' and therefore doesn't have Samsungs 3 year warranty. You are therefore left with a only a year from play.com. It's also an OEM, so no retail packaging (which is fine by me, no point in wasting a box) but play.com simply packaged the drive in a jiffy bag which came through my letterbox. Luckily the drive seems to have escaped damage.
Overall the item is great though.