SPCR

Posted: **Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:51 pm**

jussi wrote:My Samsung fight is getting dirty I have bit of troube RMAing faulty discs so I had to write an email to Samsung support and try to convince them that I got faulty drives.

I'll include the email here, maybe it contains something of value to others:

I bought four HD103UJ drives about four months ago from Germany. I live in Finland.

I installed the drives to a RAID5 array (linux software raid) and for a while they seemed to work fine.

After a month or two I found out that there was something wrong with the drives when two of the discs dropped from the array (one had failed before the other, but I didn't notice that before the 2nd went down). I was able to recover the data thanks to linux raid tools.

This is when I started to diagnose what went wrong. I quickly found out that writing to discs would often increase SMART "Current Pending Sector Count" attribute. One disc was worse than the others, but all of them had problems with that.

During testing process I changed everything in my hardware configuration; PSU:s, cables, SATA controllers, etc. and the result was always the same; increased Pending Sector Count value and read errors.

It turned out that I was able to reset the SMART attributes by filling the discs with zero (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xxx). Surprisingly this worked! The Pending Sector Count would reset to 0 and there were no Relocated Sectors or anything else that would indicate a bad drive.

But partitioning the drives and actually using them in a real filesystem would soon result in pending sectors and eventually disc would drop from the raid array.

Having changed everything else but the discs obviously led me to conclusion that there was something wrong with the drives themselves. I tested them with HUTIL 2.10 and got lots of "Surface scan ECC error"s and "M.C. ECC error"s on all of the four discs.

I contacted the seller and asked for replacement units. They wanted me to contact Samsung Finland and make sure that I had tested the discs correctly.

I made a call to Samsung Finland support and they confirmed that if HUTIL 2.10 shows a sector error that would indicate a failed drive which can be RMA'd.

The seller agreed and I sent the discs back to them.

Now the seller emailed me and say that the discs are not faulty. They had contacted Samsung Germany and were informed that HUTIL 2.10 does not work correctly on all Samsung discs. The new testing method would be running HDAT2.

Apparently the four discs that I sent would all pass the HDAT2 test, and now the seller refuses to replace the discs.

My question is can you please confirm the seller to RMA the discs? I tested the discs as was instructed by Samsung Finland and they proved to be faulty.

Also, I can provide you with Linux logs that indicate the drive failures.
The serial number of the four discs was almost sequential and they had F/W revision 1AA01106

I'll keep you posted in case I actually get a reply from Samsung. Until then I'm out of discs and 1000 euros.

Read this:
Q: What is time-limited error recovery and why do I need it?
A: Desktop drives are designed to protect and recover data, at times pausing for as much as a few minutes to make sure that data is recovered. Inside a RAID system, where the RAID controller handles error recovery, the drive needn't pause for extended periods to recover data. In fact, heroic error recovery attempts can cause a RAID system to drop a drive out of the array. WD RE2 is engineered to prevent hard drive error recovery fallout by limiting the drive's error recovery time. With error recovery factory set to seven seconds, the drive has time to attempt a recovery, allow the RAID controller to log the error, and still stay online.

You need the Raid version of the drive.
Samsung HE103UJ

WD RE2 or RE2-GP
Seagate ES

Posted: **Mon Apr 21, 2008 3:15 pm**

zoob wrote:What version of Matrix Storage Manager did you use?
Usually when I install Vista 64 I do not need drivers on install, but later when I install this, it'll say it's older than what's currently installed. I say overwrite the newer ones and things like eSATA start working.

Version: 7.8.0.1012

Did you install the Intel INF (Chipset driver) first and then Intel Matrix?

I've just realised something quite stupid. On Intel Matrix it says everything is OK until you goto advanced and then it shows your drives!!

It is now saying Generation 2 and NCQ enabled

I've noticed in device manager however that write cache is disabled (unless Matrix is now controlling this). The actual AHCI driver that comes with Matrix is a little old - is it possible to use both at the same time? I'm assuming this might mess things up.

With the latest driver I have write cache enabled but I can't see NCQ or SATA-II as I wouldn't have matrix installed

Also HD Tune Pro doesn't show any information about the 320 anymore with Matrix installed, but it stills shows info about the 1TB. Incidentally it is still UDMA-6.

But at least its working now. I hope I don't have to reinstall again for a while!!

Posted: **Tue Apr 22, 2008 2:02 am**

My results with the 250GB 1 platter HD250HJ:

Pretty fast, and its very....very quiet.

Accesstime looks a bit high, but thats with AAM enabled.

Posted: **Tue Apr 22, 2008 10:38 am**

I like how they worded this: "Desktop drives are designed to protect and recover data", as if other drives are 'designed' to do the opposite. "Error recovery attempts can cause a RAID system to drop a drive out of the array" like RAID is so primitive that those intervals cannot be reprogrammed.

So are the 750 F1 and hd250hj (S250 series) perpendicular recording too?

Posted: **Tue Apr 22, 2008 11:17 am**

zzombi wrote:I like how they worded this: "Desktop drives are designed to protect and recover data", as if other drives are 'designed' to do the opposite. "Error recovery attempts can cause a RAID system to drop a drive out of the array" like RAID is so primitive that those intervals cannot be reprogrammed.

So are the 750 F1 and hd250hj (S250 series) perpendicular recording too?

Yesh both are perpendicular recording hard drives, only 250GB per platter instead of 334GB.

Posted: **Sat Apr 26, 2008 3:00 pm**

checked my 1TB with both the old hdutil 2.10 version and the new EStools 2.11 ones, didn't do the full surface scan with hdutil, but did do one with estools, neither showed any errors at all.

it's got a 2008-02 date on it.

Posted: **Sat Apr 26, 2008 3:39 pm**

Hello ACook,

How does your 1TB drive's acoustics compare to the HD501LJ?

Posted: **Sun Apr 27, 2008 12:55 am**

Michael Sandstrom wrote:How does your 1TB drive's acoustics compare to the HD501LJ?

I've just installed one (in a P182)... I'm afraid the answer is "unfavourably," at least with my sample.

I've found HD501LJs in the same setup to be just barely audible in very quiet conditions, and their idle sound is a kind of faint "whoosh" or "hiss," which is entirely inoffensive and easily ignored. The HD103UJ is somewhat different in character - it's considerably more tonal (there's a noticeable "hum" element) and, although it's still pretty quiet in absolute terms, it's the *type* of sound which is much more difficult to tune out of your consciousness. In fact, it reminds me somewhat of recent Seagates, although nowhere near as bad, thank god.

Seeks are about the same as the HD501LJ, a little lighter in pitch and perhaps even a bit quieter. I've left AAM at the default settings, as it's not intrusive (even with Vista's endless churning), and I don't mind a small amount of seek noise anyway.

On the plus side, it passed all the ESTools tests without error, and chkdsk /f /r didn't find anything untoward either.

I should mention that HDD idle whine is a pet hate of mine, and I get neurotic about even the tiniest amount, so I may be making a mountain out of a molehill... it just depends on your own particular sensitivities I guess.

Or maybe I just got an unusually noisy one, knowing my luck it's not beyond the realms of possibility.

Posted: **Sun Apr 27, 2008 9:20 am**

i'll have a listen later on, my 500G model has an issue where if I try to copy a specific file within windows it locks up and there are some clicks, I think. But it's in the other machine still.

will copy all the stuff to the 1TB drive later, and see what's up and do some other scans as well. luckily I found a receipt for another one I got 6months ago at a local store, so I can more easily return it..

I'm procrastinating like crazy with the switch from one pc to another, so it's taking it's time...

did some extra tests:

HUtil 2.04 (even though it doesn't support this model)

HD753LJ
Rom rev.: 1AA01107
Serial no: S13UJ1MQ117079
All Tests Pass

HD103UJ
Rom rev.: 1AA01109
Serial no: S13PJ1DQ201455
All Tests Pass

HUtil 2.10

HD753LJ
Check M.C.: Ecc error.
All others pass, inc full surface scan.
First time it was empty, so did a full erase like the program suggested, but that didn't change anthing.

HD103UJ
All Tests Passed.

EStool 2.11

HD753LJ
All Tests Passed.
(no Check M.C. test to pass here....)
Service Code => SJ19: Test OK

HD103UJ
All Tests Passed, inc full surface scan.

(surface scans were performed earlier)

Posted: **Mon Apr 28, 2008 11:14 pm**

Why do you even bother on a drive that you need to check so carefully? I know I lost interest in it, because I need stuff to just work.

Posted: **Tue Apr 29, 2008 2:17 am**

lm wrote:Why do you even bother on a drive that you need to check so carefully? I know I lost interest in it, because I need stuff to just work.

I'd check *any* new drive that carefully, regardless of make or model - automatically assuming an untested drive will "just work" is asking for trouble IMO.

The way I look at it, any drive is liable to fail at any time, but if the HD103UJ is still running without incident after a month or so, I think it could be treated as "safe" (as much as a mechanical hard drive ever can be).

Posted: **Tue Apr 29, 2008 3:43 am**

same here. with the masses of data on these drives, a failure becomes more and more massive as well.

Posted: **Tue Apr 29, 2008 12:40 pm**

Always have a backup of any drive, small or large. The size is irrelevant. The backup is not.

Posted: **Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:37 pm**

Hello everyone,

I've bought Samsung F1 1TB recently. After doing some tests, I have noticed that access time on my disk is quite high comparing to others results (~19ms vs ~13ms).
Here is a screenshot from HD Tune:

I'm using MSI P35 Platinum motherboard with ICH9R northbridge. Running Vista x64 SP1 and XP SP2, both the same results. AAC according to ESTool from samsung website is disabled. What's the problem about that ? Could it be duff unit or misconfiguration ?

Posted: **Tue May 06, 2008 9:28 pm**

I just got 2x1TB F1 (consecutive serial numbers) and estool (2.11) finds 3 ECC errors on the first one (which has the OS installed as well) with full scan. The 2nd one seems to be fine (at 96% full scan now with estool).

I will do a perfect copy of the "defective" to the "good" one and then play more until I get bored and send the disk back (erase the disk as estool recommends, tests with HD Tune both drives, test again with estool). Speaking of HD Tune: I don't get ANY parameter in the "Health" window of HD Tune and most bolded parameters from the screenshot above (Serial number, supported/active, buffer, firmware...) are missing in my case for both F1 disks (I think it was working on the older Samsung 500GB I had before). Anyone seen this before? Speedfan reports the SMART parameters fine.

Posted: **Wed May 07, 2008 1:12 pm**

Are you using them in SATA-II/NCQ mode? The same thing happened to me. The boot drive doesn't show anything in HD Tune regarding serial number etc. when in this mode.

In SATA-I mode it reports everything.

Speedfan continues to work fine so I guess its a HD Tune bug. OR a bug with the SATA driver included with Intel Matrix.

Posted: **Thu May 08, 2008 8:04 am**

Correct - I think at the time HD tune was showing the serial number I was using IDE emulation from BIOS so I guess this is the issue. Funny thing I can't seem to find how to force the drives to SATA-1 from my BIOS (Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R) - there might be a way from estool but I forgot to test last time I was in DOS. Even funier is that while changing modes in BIOS (without touching specific sizes or anything with RAID) I managed to screw up the "size" of the "good" F1 and I thought I lost that drive too but I recovered it without any problem with estool (it was set to 64MB somehow!!). Right now even if I set BIOS to IDE emulation I still see the hard drives in control panel as SATA and HD tune still doesn't show the parameters but I do have a 70% speed loss so the disks ARE probably in some "lower speed" mode but not in the one that works with HD Tune... This doesn't matter so much for the moment (I reverted to the best I could get in my BIOS anyway).

Update for the first (bad) F1 hdd (see above):

- hutil can't see any of the disks (only the IDE cdrom)
- HD Tune was showing also errors (one block but the blocks are huge there, 300+ megs)
- I couldn't make an image from the drive (2 errors)
- I did erase the drive with estool and now both estool and hd tune report good full scans. I'm filling up both disks with some huge dummy files and I'll be checksumming them for quite a few days...

Speaking of full drives: the drives are fine as far as noise goes but if you need to do a lot of seeks in "distant" places do they get really loud (I'm talking about those very short seeking noises)? Also I've noticed with both drives at poweroff (or probably when windows parks the heads if this is still done these days) some "metal" noise - not very loud but clear and hard to describe - like a metal blade "pinched". The noises don't bother me at all (I actually like to hear the activity) but I'd like to know if I should be worried.

Posted: **Thu May 08, 2008 11:05 pm**

a200 wrote: Speaking of full drives: the drives are fine as far as noise goes but if you need to do a lot of seeks in "distant" places do they get really loud (I'm talking about those very short seeking noises)? Also I've noticed with both drives at poweroff (or probably when windows parks the heads if this is still done these days) some "metal" noise - not very loud but clear and hard to describe - like a metal blade "pinched". The noises don't bother me at all (I actually like to hear the activity) but I'd like to know if I should be worried.

Mine does exactly the same... it makes the "ting" noise when powering down, and occasionally opening a folder tree in Explorer (drive's about 60% full) will bring on a sudden frenetic burst of *loud* seeking - much, much louder than the faint rustling associated with normal seeks.

It's quite rare it does this, and it's only for a couple of seconds at a time, but the last time I remember a drive doing something similar, it died shortly after... I hope it's just a peculiarity of the model. I ran all the ESTool tests again and they came up clean, for what it's worth.

It's probably nothing to worry about, but all-in-all I'm not very happy with the drive. Yes, it's very fast copying files, but the speed advantage over a WD GP isn't exactly a deal-maker, at least for my purposes.

Posted: **Wed May 14, 2008 6:34 pm**

Just ordered 12 of these today, for my new fileserver...

Time will show if they will behave with a 3ware 9500S-12...

Posted: **Wed May 14, 2008 11:56 pm**

I have had bad experiences with the 3Ware controllers. Unless you are lucky and get RAID edition drives, they more often than not kick out perfectly good drives from an array because it took longer than expected to return from a recalibration run

Posted: **Fri May 16, 2008 12:57 pm**

Hello,

I'm seeing a lot of problems with the HD753LJ. Is it safe to assume that the 640GB version is clear of said problems? And/or the 1TB version?

Thanks.

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2008 4:13 am**

I have seen more complaints from 1TB clients. It seems the 750 and 250 are safer because of decreased platter capacity, than 320 640 and 1T.
Pitty, the 640 is very conveniently priced now, and has a speed advantage over 750.

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2008 5:04 am**

zzombi wrote:I have seen more complaints from 1TB clients. It seems the 750 and 250 are safer because of decreased platter capacity, than 320 640 and 1T.
Pitty, the 640 is very conveniently priced now, and has a speed advantage over 750.

It's too bad :/ I really wanted one of with the 334GB platters.

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2008 10:18 am**

I have had one of these in use for around three weeks now. All ESTools check passed, including the surface scan. I did not try HDTools as Samsung say its incompatible. Errors found with it are of no use.

I was a little dubious about my purchase following all the bad reports on the net, but the price difference between the Samsung and other 1TB drives is huge.

+1 happy 1TB Samsung owner.

In use, my untrained ears find it to be only marginally louder than my 80GB Segate Barracuda IV.

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2008 11:17 am**

I'm interested in the 640GB model, too. The price is very interesting, but if there are complaints with it, i will buy another model. What's the platter density of disks in this page? http://www.totalmodding.com/index.php?cPath=1976_1981

It's an italian page

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2008 11:37 am**

_MarcoM_ wrote:I'm interested in the 640GB model, too. The price is very interesting, but if there are complaints with it, i will buy another model. What's the platter density of disks in this page? http://www.totalmodding.com/index.php?cPath=1976_1981

It's an italian page

Samsung 1000GB HD103UJ SATA II 32MB 3x334GB
Samsung 250GB HD250HJ SATA II 8MB 1x250GB
Samsung 320GB HD321KJ SATA II 16MB 2x166GB
Samsung 500GB HD501LJ SATA II 16MB 3x166GB
Samsung 640GB HD642JJ SATA II 16MB 2x334GB

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2008 11:38 am**

_MarcoM_ wrote:I'm interested in the 640GB model, too. The price is very interesting, but if there are complaints with it, i will buy another model. What's the platter density of disks in this page? http://www.totalmodding.com/index.php?cPath=1976_1981

It's an italian page

Which one?

1) 3x334GB
2) 1x250GB (I guess)
3) 2x166GB
4) 3x166GB
5) 2x334GB

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2008 12:12 pm**

Nice rpsgc and nicko, so the most interesting models for me are the 250GB and the 640GB disks. More opinions on realiability are welcome

Posted: **Sat May 17, 2008 11:31 pm**

I have one in a SATA-USB enclosure thingy. It's not getting overly hot and is making pretty low noise for 7200RPM but both noise and vibration wise it does not match a GreenPower by quite a bit.

Let's just say I will probably order the GreenPower the next time I need a disk, never mind it costs 10% more but I'm not very much interested in raw speed. But if you're after speed, the Samsung is a good compromise I guess.

Posted: **Sun May 18, 2008 12:08 am**

Like you oberbimbo, i'm not interested in raw speed, and the WD GP was a good choice for me, too.
But a day or two per week i need to reorganize almost 100GBs of rar/zip archive on disk, so a little bit of speed is welcome here.

Actually i'm using a Caviar RE2 as OS disk: 100GB/platter, 45dB of noise

Hope HD250HJ or HD642JJ will be better in terms of performance and noise...

SPCR

Samsung F1 series hard drives w/1TB model