SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG 2TB HD204UI/Z4

zsero · **Posted:** Tue Feb 15, 2011 6:55 am

dragonfruit wrote:

There have been tested 5 hard drives using different tests (mainly surface access times tests):

1. Samsung HD204UI in Verbatim 2 TB 3.0 USB enclosure.
2. Samsung SP1614N
3. WDC WD6400AAKS
4. WDC WD1600BEVS
5. Seagate ST320410A

The tests results are in 149 files of the screenshots of these tests, available to download in this thread:
http://forum.hddguru.com/surface-test-hdds-t18575.html

1. Generally Samsung drives (even the new 2TB Samsung HD204UI) seem to have considerably poorer quality of the surface comparing to the 3 years old (or so) Western Digital WDC WD6400AAKS.

2. I would like to see similar tests, in particular of other brands and models of 2 TB hard drives. Please upload your tests results in that thread (click the link above).

3. I wonder why in some hard drives slower access times can bee seen aligning in some diagonal patterns (in HD204UI) and why in some other drives (in WDC WD1600BEVS) a checkered pattern appears (only from the second half of the scan) which "shape" changes regularly depending on the part of the disk surface scanned, while in some other drives no such regular patterns are present?

4. Why is there such a difference in SMART status health notification between various software for Samsung SP1614N (it is red for most of the tests in HDD Health and everything OK in HD Tune)? There is also a significant difference in MHDD scan result and HDDScan result for SP1614N.

5. BTW, it took ca. 31 h to test Samsung HD204UI in Verbatim 2 TB 3.0 USB enclosure on USB 2.0 port.

How do you know that what MHDD reports is comparable between brands? I mean it can be something like SMART, which is preatty useless, except for maybe temperature. And how many of these drives actually fail because of surface problems? I haven't seen a drive in recent years which failed because of surface problems, except my Seagate 7200.12s in a RAID, where 5 drive out of 5 started to produce something like 1 bad sector a day. But a bad sector is fantastic, as no data is lost and you get a new drive after RMA.

dragonfruit · **Posted:** Tue Feb 15, 2011 7:04 am

Quote:

How do you know that what MHDD reports is comparable between brands?

I do not know, but why wouldn't they be comparable? Most of the tests were done using HDDScan, only some using MHDD.

Quote:

I mean it can be something like SMART, which is preatty useless, except for maybe temperature. And how many of these drives actually fail because of surface problems? I haven't seen a drive in recent years which failed because

But it is not only about failures, but also how fast and efficient it works.

Quote:

of surface problems, except my Seagate 7200.12s in a RAID, where 5 drive out of 5 started to produce something like 1 bad sector a day. But a bad sector is fantastic, as no data is lost and you get a new drive after RMA.

New? Or rather repaired (refurbished) usually (and not the same one you sent them). Also if the warranty expired you can't RMA it.

dragonfruit · **Posted:** Tue Feb 15, 2011 7:11 am

Samsung customer service is rather not what you would expect:
http://forum.hddguru.com/verbatim-usb-e ... ml#p124618

zsero · **Posted:** Tue Feb 15, 2011 7:52 am

Where I live, you always contact your reseller for warranty problems and they give you a new one when they found out that it's indeed bad. For a hard drive it means I need to wait like 3 days till they test it and after 3 days I get a new drive.

About being fast and efficient, I don't see the point. HDD is for storage, they are great in sequential read or write, but terrible otherwise. For anything fast there are SSDs.

As long as the drive doesn't fail unexpectedly and the manufacturer doesn't implement newer and newer trick into the firmware to stop the drives being used in RAID environments I'd just use them. And I've seen guys building huge storage platforms from Hitachi and Samsung drives, so I trust them.

dragonfruit · **Posted:** Tue Feb 15, 2011 8:22 am

zsero wrote:

Where I live, you always contact your reseller for warranty problems and they give you a new one when they found out that it's indeed bad. For a hard drive it means I need to wait like 3 days till they test it and after 3 days I get a new drive.

Will they do it regardless of time of purchase or only within the first 28 days?

zsero wrote:

About being fast and efficient, I don't see the point. HDD is for storage, they are great in sequential read or write, but terrible otherwise. For anything fast there are SSDs.

SDD is considerably more expensive. The point is that if there are several drives with similar price, then I would prefer to purchase faster and more reliable.

zsero · **Posted:** Tue Feb 15, 2011 9:16 am

Quote:

Will they do it regardless of time of purchase or only within the first 28 days?

In all the warranty period. That's how it works in almost all Europe. You only communicate with your reseller, which is both good and bad.

dragonfruit · **Posted:** Tue Feb 15, 2011 9:27 am

zsero wrote:

In all the warranty period. That's how it works in almost all Europe. You only communicate with your reseller, which is both good and bad.

In which shop did you purchase your disks? I believe that some of the major British suppliers replace or refund within 28 days, but after that period it is more complicated when you communicate with them...

zsero · **Posted:** Tue Feb 15, 2011 9:33 am

dragonfruit wrote:

zsero wrote:

In all the warranty period. That's how it works in almost all Europe. You only communicate with your reseller, which is both good and bad.

In which shop did you purchase your disks? I believe that some of the major British suppliers replace or refund within 28 days, but after that period it is more complicated when you communicate with them...

I'm just studying here, I purchased those in Hungary. I know warranty depends from reseller to reseller in the UK, but you always contact the reseller, never the brand.

dragonfruit · **Posted:** Wed Feb 16, 2011 6:28 am

Ridiculous Samsung replies:
http://forum.hddguru.com/verbatim-usb-e ... ml#p124735
http://forum.hddguru.com/verbatim-usb-e ... ml#p124618

Thay claim that applying their patch won't change the firmware. LOL

doveman · **Posted:** Mon Mar 28, 2011 10:45 am

I've just bought one of these (was going to get the WD20EARS, but got scared off by reports of BSOD when waking Win7), so after applying the firmware update, I formatted it in Win7_64 and tested it with HDTune v.255 and HDTach 3.0.1.0.

For some reason, HDTune reports slower Burst Rate for me than earlier posters, whilst HDTach is comparable to their results.

I then used HDDScan to enable AAM and set it to 128 and re-tested. It didn't affect the results much except for the Access Time, which was slightly higher. HDDTach reported higher Access Times than HDTune, and again these were higher with AAM on.

Here's one comparing the HD204UI to my HD103UJ (both with AAM off):

doveman · **Posted:** Mon Mar 28, 2011 5:49 pm

Well ain't that a bitch!

I created my partitions (15GB, 50GB, 15GB Primary, 300GB Logical, 1.3TB Logical, 150GB unallocated) in Win7 and copied a load of stuff to the 1.3TB partition.

Then I moved it to my other box running XP to copy some more data and noticed I hadn't made any partitions active, so I made the first partition active in XP's Disk Manager and Poof! the 1.3TB partition disappeared, so now it shows 1450GB unallocated :evil:

Surely making a primary partition active in XP shouldn't destroy logical partitions should it? I need to dual/triple-boot this drive, so I'd be using Grub4dos to make different partitions active at boot, which shouldn't be a problem should it?

Any suggestions on what utility might be able to restore the partiton and the data on it?

zsero · **Posted:** Mon Mar 28, 2011 10:18 pm

I don't know any free, but I had huge success with File Scavenger
http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

Or you can try Active Partion Recovery too:
http://www.partition-recovery.com/

I think you will need an other 1.5 TB drive temporarily.

doveman · **Posted:** Tue Mar 29, 2011 6:57 am

Thanks for the suggestions. File Scavenger looks like it might be useful. I've tried a couple of others and they aren't able to find any files in the unpartitioned space.

Testdisk is a free partition recovery program and I tried it and it did identify my missing partition, and showed the label (Data) I gave it, so hopefully that can restore it, but I'm wary that this will involve writing to the drive and I seem to recall I tried this a while ago with a different drive and it didn't work properly and made things worse, so I'll probably try and get the files back, or at least some of them, before trying this.

zsero · **Posted:** Tue Mar 29, 2011 8:12 am

doveman wrote:

Thanks for the suggestions. File Scavenger looks like it might be useful. I've tried a couple of others and they aren't able to find any files in the unpartitioned space.

Testdisk is a free partition recovery program and I tried it and it did identify my missing partition, and showed the label (Data) I gave it, so hopefully that can restore it, but I'm wary that this will involve writing to the drive and I seem to recall I tried this a while ago with a different drive and it didn't work properly and made things worse, so I'll probably try and get the files back, or at least some of them, before trying this.

Try File Scavenger, the demo can tell you if it found the partition or not. Or if you prefer open source, download SystemRescueCD and read all these pages:
http://www.sysresccd.org/

And never write anything to the HDD, just read from it!

doveman · **Posted:** Tue Mar 29, 2011 8:41 am

Thanks. I had a quick look at SystemRescueCD, but the main tool on it that would seem to be most useful for my problem is Testdisk and I can just run that from Windows or DOS already.

I actually used Testdisk to retrieve a file from the missing partition (to a different HD of course) and it seemed to work but resulted in a corrupted file that was smaller than it should be. There is an alternative way of doing this in Testdisk though, so I'll try that.

I'm currently scanning with File Scavenger and it's very slow (the Quick search didn't find any files, so I'm running the Long search). Testdisk finds the files without a long scan, so I'm not sure why File Scavenger has to but if it gets my files back where Testdisk can't, I'm not going to complain!

doveman · **Posted:** Tue Mar 29, 2011 9:09 am

Even though the file recovered by Testdisk was the wrong size, strangely it appears NOT to be corrupt.

It's a Truecrypt file and the recovered file is 1.6GB smaller than it should be. Nevertheless, it opens fine and all the files inside appear to be OK as well. Once mounted, Windows says the Truecrypt partition is the proper size (IE bigger than the actual file), which doesn't make much sense!

I guess I should create a new Truecrypt file and copy the files across as it's obviously not quite right, but at least the files inside are OK, which is the main thing.

I'll still try the alternative Testdisk recovery method to see if it recovers the file to the right size and might use File Scavenger for some other files as Testdisk only lets you recover one file at a time, which is rather tedious, and it's quite slow as well.

Once I've recovered any critical files, I'll probably just try Testdisk to recover the partition, rather than copy all the files to another HD first. Hopefully it will work, but if not I won't have lost anything important.

It's made me realise I need to sort out my backup procedures anyway!

doveman · **Posted:** Wed Mar 30, 2011 11:14 am

Thankfully everything's sorted now

I did use File Scavenger to retrieve my files to a spare HD, but then I used Testdisk to recover the partition which worked fine. File Scavenger seemed to do a better job at retrieving individual files though, as my Truecrypt container was the correct size, unlike with Testdisk.

Also, I used Acronis True Image WD edition to copy my boot partitions from my old to my new HD and I checked them afterwards with Samsung's Align tool and it reports all my partitions are aligned, so I can confirm that TI WD edition works fine with AFD drives. I read that you need a WD drive in the system to use it, but my old HD is a WD so I didn't have any problems.

There's definitely a lot of noise from the F4 until it's suspended. Until I suspended it I had it resting on a gelpack on top of an empty cardboard box and there was a lot of head noise, but it seems about the same as my old WD64000AAKS now that I've suspended it. I didn't compare it to any other drives sitting on the gelpack, so I can't really say whether it's much better or worse than any other drive.

zsero · **Posted:** Wed Mar 30, 2011 12:56 pm

doveman wrote:

Thankfully everything's sorted now

I did use File Scavenger to retrieve my files to a spare HD, but then I used Testdisk to recover the partition which worked fine. File Scavenger seemed to do a better job at retrieving individual files though, as my Truecrypt container was the correct size, unlike with Testdisk.

Also, I used Acronis True Image WD edition to copy my boot partitions from my old to my new HD and I checked them afterwards with Samsung's Align tool and it reports all my partitions are aligned, so I can confirm that TI WD edition works fine with AFD drives. I read that you need a WD drive in the system to use it, but my old HD is a WD so I didn't have any problems.

There's definitely a lot of noise from the F4 until it's suspended. Until I suspended it I had it resting on a gelpack on top of an empty cardboard box and there was a lot of head noise, but it seems about the same as my old WD64000AAKS now that I've suspended it. I didn't compare it to any other drives sitting on the gelpack, so I can't really say whether it's much better or worse than any other drive.

I'm glad that you made it at the end! File Scavenger can really do amazing things. It just works!

On the subject, I have to tell that I started by being super-enthusiatic about the HD204UI, but the 7200 rpm like vibration and the various quality control made me turn back to the WD. I bought a WD20EARS, the new 3-platter one, and I have to tell you that the difference is absolutely amazing. The WD is one of the quietest drive I have ever had, while the Samsung is just ridiculously loud and vibrating. I never thought that I'm going to say the following, but I have to say that the WD is just much faster and has much more constant quality control. I'd guess that about 5 WD drives would do as much vibration as my 1 Samsung.

In the end, it turned out that Samsung became a backup-only drive. I put it in a USB caddy once a month, it's perfect for that purpose. But other than that, I wouldn't use it.

doveman · **Posted:** Wed Mar 30, 2011 2:04 pm

I was going to get the WD20EARS but was put off by reports off it causing BSOD when resuming in Win7, apparently due to the slow spin-up time. Even the Microsoft patch didn't seem to fix this problem for some people.

Anyway, now that it's suspended I'm quite happy with my F4. I'll probably experiment with the AAM settings to see if they make much difference, but I don't feel I really need to. The fans in my HTPC aren't exactly super-quiet, so once I sort them out I might find the F4 more intrusive, but I'm trying not to be too obsessive about noise and stop tinkering once it becomes quiet enough not to be noticeable unless I listen for it.

It's not easy when you're somewhat obsessive like I am, but there's more important areas to direct my OCD towards :lol:

doveman · **Posted:** Sat Apr 02, 2011 2:43 am

Doh, I messed it up again. :roll:

I had left some unpartitioned space at the end of the drive and went to partition it in XP, which failed with an error and then deleted my logical partition again. :evil:

I know I should have done this in Win7 (although I don't recall reading that doing it in XP would delete partitions, only that the partition would be unaligned), but I haven't got it installed on the PC in question at the moment, so are there any free tools that will allow me to partition this space without knackering my other partition? I think I read that parted 2.2 will, but would be grateful for confirmation and suggestions of other tools before I go ahead.

CX23882-19 · **Posted:** Mon Apr 11, 2011 8:42 am

Have Samsung truly fixed SMART or have they implemented some kludge to work around the problem?

I have a pair of these HD204UI disks, with the 'fixed' firmware, manufacture date March 2011. Although I am not seeing data corruption (and I have done a lot of copying them full and md5 checksumming before even considering using them) they both keep incrementing their ATA error count in the SMART log with an "abort" error. I can see it in dmesg too. It appears they do this when SMART is queried whilst they are in low-power mode, at which point the SATA controller performs a reset and they continue working. If I am streaming video files from them there will be a delay whilst this happens. All of actual the SMART counters (error rates, reallocated sectors etc.) are healthy.

If I send hdparm commands to disable idle sleep after bootup (Ubuntu 10.04 seems to be somewhat broken at setting /etc/hdparm.conf itself) the ATA errors cease. If I reboot and forget to set it, they increase again, either gradually throughout the day (background SMART polling?) or every time I manually read the SMART data.

Nothing special about the disk controller, nVidia MCP51 with SWNCQ and RAID disabled. And works perfectly with my various Hitachi and WD disks.

dragonfruit · **Posted:** Mon Apr 11, 2011 9:45 am

CX23882-19 wrote:

Have Samsung truly fixed SMART or have they implemented some kludge to work around the problem?

I have a pair of these HD204UI disks, with the 'fixed' firmware, manufacture date March 2011. Although I am not seeing data corruption (and I have done a lot of copying them full and md5 checksumming before even considering using them) they both keep incrementing their ATA error count in the SMART log with an "abort" error. I can see it in dmesg too. It appears they do this when SMART is queried whilst they are in low-power mode, at which point the SATA controller performs a reset and they continue working. If I am streaming video files from them there will be a delay whilst this happens. All of actual the SMART counters (error rates, reallocated sectors etc.) are healthy.

If I send hdparm commands after bootup (Ubuntu 10.04 seems to be somewhat broken at setting /etc/hdparm.conf itself) the ATA errors cease. If I reboot and forget to set it, they increase again, either gradually throughout the day (background SMART polling?) or every time I manually read the SMART data.

Nothing special about the disk controller, nVidia MCP51 with SWNCQ and RAID disabled. And works perfectly with my various Hitachi and WD disks.

I forwarded your message to Samsung. Their reply:

"Dear Customer,

Samsung have provided a patch tool for HD204UI not a update on firmware.

The patch tool that samsung have provided is to resolve the issue to the unit that sudden lost data.

Please refer : http://www.samsung.com/global/business/ ... msg_id=386

for more information and guidelines. We recomment to used this tool for your data safe.

If you need more assistance please contact Samsung technical support 1-800-726-7864 for further assistance.

Thank you for choosing Samsung."

CX23882-19 · **Posted:** Mon Apr 11, 2011 11:29 am

I have run that tool, and I still get the ATA reset problem when querying SMART when the disk is idle.

I guess I will sell these buggy drives and get a pair of Hitachi 5K3000 instead.

dmesg

Quote:

[ 8719.657212] ata5.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6
[ 8719.657227] ata5.00: failed command: SMART
[ 8719.657242] ata5.00: cmd b0/d1:01:01:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 tag 0 pio 512 in
[ 8719.657244] res 51/84:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[ 8719.657251] ata5.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 8719.657256] ata5.00: error: { ICRC ABRT }
[ 8719.657270] ata5: hard resetting link
[ 8719.657274] ata5: nv: skipping hardreset on occupied port
[ 8720.140095] ata5: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 8720.160235] ata5.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
[ 8720.160245] ata5.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
[ 8725.140053] ata5: hard resetting link
[ 8725.140062] ata5: nv: skipping hardreset on occupied port
[ 8725.632574] ata5: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 8725.670386] ata5.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 8725.670444] ata5: EH complete

SMART log:

Quote:

Error 28 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 109 hours (4 days + 13 hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.

After command completion occurred, registers were:
ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
84 51 00 00 4f c2 00 Error: ABRT

Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- --------------------
b0 d0 01 00 4f c2 00 0a 00:00:08.749 SMART READ DATA
b0 d0 01 00 4f c2 00 0a 00:00:08.749 SMART READ DATA
b0 da 00 00 4f c2 00 0a 00:00:08.749 SMART RETURN STATUS
b0 da 00 00 4f c2 00 0a 00:00:08.749 SMART RETURN STATUS
ec 00 01 00 00 00 00 0a 00:00:08.749 IDENTIFY DEVICE

dragonfruit · **Posted:** Mon Apr 11, 2011 11:38 am

CX23882-19 wrote:

I have run that tool, and I still get the ATA reset problem when querying SMART when the disk is idle.

Just forward your message to Samsung. It is very quick and easy:
https://contactus.samsung.com/customer/ ... OD_ID=1274

dragonfruit · **Posted:** Mon Apr 11, 2011 12:22 pm

Samsung's reply:

"Dear customer,

We suggest to try to disable the Sata controller to avoid any error of your device.

If the problem persist we suggest to contact Samsung technical support 1-800-726-7864 for further assistance.

Thank you."

tima · **Joined:** Mon Oct 11, 2004 7:18 am **Posts:** 74

zsero wrote:

On the subject, I have to tell that I started by being super-enthusiatic about the HD204UI, but the 7200 rpm like vibration and the various quality control made me turn back to the WD. I bought a WD20EARS, the new 3-platter one, and I have to tell you that the difference is absolutely amazing. The WD is one of the quietest drive I have ever had, while the Samsung is just ridiculously loud and vibrating. I never thought that I'm going to say the following, but I have to say that the WD is just much faster and has much more constant quality control. I'd guess that about 5 WD drives would do as much vibration as my 1 Samsung.

My HD204UI made a horrible rhythmic hum mounted on grommets in my old P180B, which I recently brought out of retirement to be a secondary PC. None of my WD green drives, 7200 RPM WD drives, or 7200 RPM Hitachi drives ever did that, not in my P180B or my P182, which replaced the P180B a couple of years ago for my main system. I sent the HD204UI back. I also have an older 7200 RPM Samsung drive, the 500 GB HD501LJ, and it made the same kind of hum in the P180B. I ended up using the Hitachi 7K100 750GB drive for the P180B system. Each Samsung drive was installed as the only HD in the P180B, but ISTR it was partly the hum that made me retire the HD501LJ in the first place from my multiple-drive main system.

CX23882-19 · **Posted:** Tue Apr 12, 2011 11:16 am

I moved the 2 HD204UI disks to an old SII3114 controller I had lying around and the problems seem to have ceased. It would appear that the problem is the MCP51 SATA controller, or some kind of compatibility issue between the HD204UI and MCP51.

dragonfruit · **Posted:** Mon Aug 01, 2011 5:56 pm

There are two Samsung 2TB HD204UI bought together (their S/N is different just by one digit at the end, so they had to be next to each other on the assembly line), but they behave very differently in tests, as you can see here:
http://forum.hddguru.com/samsung-2tb-hd ... 20154.html

Do you think those HDDs should be RMAed?

Could you please test yours HDDs for comparison.

Many thanks.

Vetotat · **Posted:** Fri Aug 12, 2011 6:38 am

I bought an F4EG a month ago, and now it is reporting SMART-errors. It's something about spin up time. I've tried to run a "SMART self test" (whatever that is) but it fails and tells me that there is a major risk for data loss.

CrystalDiskInfo tells me this:

What should I do?

Abula · **Posted:** Fri Aug 12, 2011 7:18 am

Did you updated the firmware of the F4EG?

SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG 2TB HD204UI/Z4

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