Samsung SpinPoint F3 - poor performance...

[UNFORGiVEN09]

Hey guys, so here is the delio...

I recently purchased a 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 SATA drive to use as storage and to download my daily stuff to.

I have a Dell 8250 system running Win XP PRO (SP3). My system boots from an IDE drive and my new SATA drive connects (via a SATA cable) to my VIA VT6421 RAID controller which then connects to my motherboard using a PCI slot. Windows can see the drive fine, I'm able to initialize it just fine then go back to DOS and use Samsung's utility to prepare the drive for windows. This works great too and I see the new drive in the My Computer area.

It's accessible too and can be written to just fine. I can transfer data to it from my internal IDE, or my external WD MyBook and it works great. Transferring data from my new 1TB SATA to the internal IDE/external WD MyBook is the problem however - it's just so slow.

It's painful to watch and I don't understand how/why it is happening. If I can write to it from the other two drives at great speed, why can I not write from it to the other two drives at a decent speed to?

Moving files from the 1TB drive to another folder on that same drive also does not work, for example when I extract .rar files and set the destination to another folder on the new drive. I don't know much about this stuff, but I have to assume that the hardware is fine if the two other drives can right to it just fine?

The Samsung HDD utility does fail a "Loop" test when it gets to the 'Surface scan' part... the message I get is "Error AJ36: bad sector!" and I was advised to format the disk and re-start the test... I did that and still got the same message. Could the bad sector be the issue? I thought if it was, I wouldn't be able to send data to it at decent speeds from other drives but as I said, I can and the problems occur when transferring from the 1TB to other drives.

Unless writing to and transferring from disks are handled by different methods and the transfer method is extremely poor because it is affected by the bad sector?

Please advise on what I can do... I can send it back by the way, I have plenty of warranty with Samsung but I wanted to see if there was anything I can do to fix it myself. I'm currently scanning the drive for errors from the Windows error-checking tool found in right-click > properties > tools.... will report back.

 

[AbsenceJam]

First off, RMA the drive. Bad sectors are never a good sign and the Samsung RMA turnaround time is 2-3 days.

Not sure on the speed issue, if it was slow for reads and writes then it would due to Windows changing it from UDMA to PIO mode. But just the one way I'm not sure of unless there's more at fault than bad sectors.
I wonder if it might be a bit of a compatibility issue with your VIA card, see if it's had any BIOS updates. You'll find out with the new drive.

Just for your reference you don't need to do any preparation of the drive with the Samsung utility. You just need to go to Disk Management in Windows and initialise/format there, do a quick format as full only does chkdsk (Windows error checking) in addition. But it's good practice to do a full surface scan with the manufacturers utility as well as it's not uncommon to get a new disk with bad sectors. You can also do this with HDTune within Windows, I wouldn't recommend the windows checking really as it's done by partition not disk.

 

[UNFORGiVEN09]

Some people said that all HDD's come with errors and the Samsung ES TOOL DOS utility might be reporting sectors as bad when in actuality, they are OK? I'm going to do a low-level format on it in a little while.

What I was wondering is about this from a stickied topic at another forum:

"If your motherboard is pre-SATA, then it is still possible to install SATA drives into your system by installing an add-on PCI SATA controller card that comes with and without RAID capabilities. (My card has RAId, but it is of no use to me!)

One thing to consider if you are adding a PCI card onto an older motherboard with a 33MHz PCI bus is that your bandwidth will be limited to 133Mhz. Therefore, if you have other devices plugged into PCI slots like a sound card, Firewire card, or other devices plugged into USB, these will all run off the PCI bus and can genuinely reduce the overall performance of the system due to the bandwidth limitations of 133MHZ."

I think what is in bold applies to me? I used EVEREST to find some info about my computer;


Motherboard Name Dell Dimension 8250

Front Side Bus Properties:

Bus Type Intel NetBurst
Bus Width 64-bit
Real Clock 133 MHz (QDR)
Effective Clock 531 MHz
Bandwidth 4245 MB/s

Memory Bus Properties:

Bus Type Dual RDRAM
Bus Width 32-bit
Real Clock 531 MHz (DDR)
Effective Clock 1061 MHz
Bandwidth 4245 MB/s

The task of sending data from the 1TB SATA drive connected via a SATA controller which plugs into an empty PCI slot could be slowed down because of the capabilities of my PCI bus - my sound card and graphics card use PCI slots and my Mouse and WD MyBook external HDD are connected via USB.

What I thought of doing was buying a SATA > IDE adapter (this one here: click

So then I would have my 1TB SATA drive connect to that adapter which connects to the IDE cable my current IDE drive is using. If everything was connected properly, I would be able to see the drive in the BIOS and install a fresh copy of XP on to it (after checking if the drive could now properly send data to itself and my external HDD of course)

My current IDE drive came with my computer in 2003, here are its statistics:

(Click the below img once to open in new window, then click the small img in the new window to make it big)



Are those stats good for a drive that old? It really does perform well, and I can on to it download at my top speed of 5.5MB/s flawlessly... so the Samsung F3 would be a great if I connect it to the IDE channel using the SATA > IDE adapter?

Once the HDD is connected to SATA channel, I would also be able to run MHDD tool and if the surface scan shows bad sectors, I could then get a replacement from Samsung.

Thanks again for reading and being patient.