Samsung 750GB drives reliability?

GeezerButler · 26 Mar 2008 at 21:45

As these are on this week only.....

I've seen a bit of chat about these drives having some reliability issues - anyone have any personal experience of this or is it just idle web chatter?

I have four other Samsung drives and they have been fine so thought I might try the 750GB as they seem pretty well priced and have been well reviewed.

Anyone care to comment?

AWPC · 27 Mar 2008 at 15:39

Mine has been perfect since new (only 1.5 months). Its essential to do a full format on these drives which takes approx 2.5-3 hours. I suspect failures are because people are only doing a quick format!

Amonlym · 27 Mar 2008 at 16:06

if memory serves the format is needed as the sammy drives have a feature whereby the first time any sector (or was it a track?) is written to the drive writes at its highest speed then reads it to check it wrote correctly if it fails it writes again at reduced speed untill it gets a working speed - once the drive knows how good the platters are, and how fast they can cope with it stops these read/write/read/write cycles. - 1 full format does the trick.

Bane · 28 Mar 2008 at 17:24

Do you have to do a whole drive single partition format, or does it also work if you create multiple partitions and then format them?

fobose · 28 Mar 2008 at 17:38

I have never ever done a full format on any of my seagate drives (or my 2.5" WD) and have not had any problems with them. I have had about 9 seagate, 1 WD and 2 maxtor. Maybe samsung are just different

ElectroBlaster · 31 Mar 2008 at 14:06

So could this be why one of my samsungs looks ill on its smart data but works perfectly ok and never looses a beat? Im another one that never does a full format and always uses the quick option.

I have two 500gb drives here and the oldest one has some rather sick smart readings on it lol, I was ment to get it rma'd.

=VTA=MANFACE · 2 Apr 2008 at 08:20

Full format took about 3 hours !...Never had any problems with mine, I'm very pleased with it, it replaced noisy Raptors.

k3v · 2 Apr 2008 at 09:15

ElectroBlaster said:
So could this be why one of my samsungs looks ill on its smart data but works perfectly ok and never looses a beat? Im another one that never does a full format and always uses the quick option.

I have two 500gb drives here and the oldest one has some rather sick smart readings on it lol, I was ment to get it rma'd.

same here, my 3 month old samsung 500 gig windows drive has thrown up smart errors, I've bought a replacement, so I was gonna rma it. if I fully format it now, will it cure the problem?