Yet another F3 failure

Vertigo · 20 Mar 2011 at 13:59

Well I never used to subscribe to the "brand X is better than brand Y" when it came to hard drives, but...

I've just had my THIRD Samsung F3 1TB drive fail on me!

All have gone pretty much the same way, with a loud mechanical clunking noise. If I can't get it working long enough to secure erase it then I won't even be bothering to RMA it as it's full of info I don't want falling into the wrong hands so I'll "format it with a sledgehammer".

Samsung is now one brand I'm never going near again. Three failures is too many to be coincidence in my book.

gEd · 20 Mar 2011 at 14:24

Out of the 4 samsung HDs I own in 2 PCs, 2 have now thrown errors in the last 8 weeks. All are all less than 3 years old. Might be my last sammy.

currently backing up PC to try and avoid loosing anything.

Then again, my mate at work was saying don't buy WD drives after the cache all went screwy on his.

Only the distributors who take returns really know which drives have the highest % of failures.

~Mike~ · 20 Mar 2011 at 14:27

That's not good. I was going to get an F3 for my upcoming build. Think I will look at Seagate & WD instead.

I'm with you on RMA'ing hard disks. I don't like sending them off with all my info on, you have no idea who's going to see it. At least HDD's are cheap.

Ch3m1c4L · 20 Mar 2011 at 22:08

do you have other brands drive in your PC? Its possible for other components to cause HDD's to fail etc.

Ive only ever had maxtor and WD drives fail on me, all the drives I buy now are samsung, had one failure since I started exclusively buying samsung (~6 years ago) and after I got a replacement, I found out it was actually the caddy/cable or something, so technically not had a failure at all.

Only drives I have that arent samsung are 2 x old seagate IDE's, old Hitachi 160gb, 2 toshiba 2.5 160gb (from dell laptop) and SSD's

Vertigo · 21 Mar 2011 at 09:56

I've got all manner of hard drives from all the major manufacturers (got a total of seven machines in the house with 13 operational drives in total).

As I said I've never subscribed to the notion that any one manufacturer is inherently worse than another as there will be odd failures of any type of drive but three failures of the exact same model is too much of a coincidence for me I'm afraid and I'll now be avoiding Samsung. Shame really as the F3 drives were very good while they lasted - fast, cheap and quiet.

The failures have been spread across two completely different machines too so it's not something else killing them, like a dodgy power supply for example.

sybaris · 21 Mar 2011 at 10:23

I have never had a Seagate fail on me. Been buying them ever since the days of 40mb hard drives. Not a single issue.

Atom · 21 Mar 2011 at 11:44

I have had 3 sammys fail. Only use WD or Seagate now.

JTrickle · 21 Mar 2011 at 11:53

Conversely Seagates are the only drives I've had fail on me.
[Jury still out on a Hitachi that has marked out bad sectors which took out my Raid last year

]

gjc10212 · 21 Mar 2011 at 11:54

I currently have two F-3's (1tb each) in two seperate systems, no issues yet. Seagate HD as well never had errors or failures on either.

scooby555t · 21 Mar 2011 at 12:42

got 2 f3's 1tb drives and 1 hitachi in my system bought at the same time no issues yet had them about a year and abit

Muel · 21 Mar 2011 at 13:34

Muel said:
Howdo,

We have 3x Samsung F1 320gb, 2x F3 320gb and 2x F3 1tb.

All of the F3s are vibratey and and loud, and one has died completely.

Enough is enough. We're looking for a new line of hard drives. They need to be as close to silent as possible, with decent performance and high reliability.

Western Digital sound about right?

From my topic: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=18708930

For me it's between Western Digital and Seagate from now on. Can't decide which.

AtaRo · 21 Mar 2011 at 13:44

My Sammy F3 1TB was doa, after testing the drive with es-tool its full of bad sectors and all I can think is poor QC.

Shaddow · 21 Mar 2011 at 14:09

Had my F3 die on me just after I had cloned it for a new build machine..

Lucky timing! Now have 2 of them in Raid 0 - so double jeapody!

RMA was quick and painless.. 3-4 days return (Uk address)

My drive crashed so hard I saw it physicaly move across the desk as it made a large CLUNK noise! Ouch

L1ght · 21 Mar 2011 at 15:08

I've got a 1TB f3 and had no problems with it so far. Touch wood anyway. All the HDD's I've had in the past have been western digital and I will keep on buying them as both of my brothers have western digital drives and have never had issues.