So much for reliability of Samsungs...

ChrisLX200 · 6 May 2006 at 09:37

SMART reports my 3-month old 250GB spinpoint is now bad and needs to be replaced. Not much impressed by that as it's only 3 months old, never got hot, and led a fairly quiet life. That will be the second drive in for RMA in the last couple weeks (other one is a Raptor).

marc2003 · 6 May 2006 at 10:00

so much for them being quiet too. well loud compared to my other drives. admittedly mine is 2nd hand but it's smart status is 100%.

Clarkey · 6 May 2006 at 14:40

one of my flatmates had a 160gb spinpoint give up the ghost a couple of days ago, it went from windows write errors to the click of death to complete failure in a space of 10 minutes. I tried recovering data from it but it was all corrupted.
They did seem quite quiet though.

jhmaeng · 6 May 2006 at 15:46

Clarkey said:
They did seem quite quiet though.

Well, they would be once they're dead, won't they?

By the way, SMART doesn't always give out the right information - it's useful to know when the fitness rating suddenly goes down, but with some drives it never reaches 100% even if the drive is fine. It's useful as a general indicator but if you want proper testing, you need to use one of the utilities of the drive manufacturer really.

Cyber-Mav · 6 May 2006 at 19:10

who said samsungs were reliable and quiet in the first place?

www.storagereview.com read there then buy a drive. if you don;t research into a product before purchase then i hope it fails on you and you lear your lesson the hard way.

ashmanq · 6 May 2006 at 19:17

Cyber-Mav said:
who said samsungs were reliable and quiet in the first place?

www.storagereview.com read there then buy a drive. if you don;t research into a product before purchase then i hope it fails on you and you lear your lesson the hard way.

Harsh!!

ChrisLX200 · 6 May 2006 at 19:59

This is bizarre. I re-booted 4/5 times and got the SMART error every time, with the F1 to resume bit. Looked in SpeedFan to see the SMART report which said the spin-up time was excessive, drive fitness was 0% - back up and get it replaced. OK, I thought I'd download the Samsung HDD utility to get a report for the RMA...

Ran the HDD utility from DOS and again - it said the SMART record for the spin-up time was excessive but it passed all other tests. The utility also tested the spin-up at the time (as well as looking at the SMART record) and said it was OK!

Puzzled, I re-booted the machine again into Windows... No errors, and now the SMART record in SpeedFan says the the disk is OK, and the spin-up parameter is back to 100% from 0%.

So it looks to me like the Samsung utility has reset the SMART record? and I have no idea if this disk is stuffed or not...

Clarkey · 8 May 2006 at 04:27

Cyber-Mav said:
who said samsungs were reliable and quiet in the first place?

www.storagereview.com read there then buy a drive. if you don;t research into a product before purchase then i hope it fails on you and you lear your lesson the hard way.

Christ, were you friends with Hitler at one time :eek:

pcknight · 8 May 2006 at 07:52

Every Manufacturer has thier problems now and again. Samsung are a good make. I do prefer Seagate though.

Dutch Guy · 8 May 2006 at 12:08

A few years ago I got a SMART message saying the IBM drive was going to die, I backed up the data but thought that the drive was still performing just fine so kept using the drive and neer saw a SMART message ever again and the drive is still running today in a mates machine.

I would back up the data and just see how it goes.

luminous · 8 May 2006 at 13:36

My 5 month old samsung died suddenly,no warning.I`d moved a lot of stuff on there from older drives to backup and lost the lot,music i`d written over the years.Not chuffed.

ashmanq · 8 May 2006 at 13:45

luminous said:
My 5 month old samsung died suddenly,no warning.I`d moved a lot of stuff on there from older drives to backup and lost the lot,music i`d written over the years.Not chuffed.

That sucks!

pcoltrane · 8 May 2006 at 16:08

marc2003 said:
so much for them being quiet too. well loud compared to my other drives. admittedly mine is 2nd hand but it's smart status is 100%.

My experience of samsung spinpoints is that they defintiely live up to their reputation of being quiet, especially the nidec motor models. I have one JVC motor drive which vibrates a little more which could potentially cause resonance in the case, but suspended or foam mounted its very quiet.
You have to suspect as a 2nd hand drive it may have had a knock or something.
The seagate and other drives i have used to build systems recently have been significantly louder.

From 6 samsung drives i have only had one failed after nearly 3 years - but that was due to a bad power surge. All data was retrievable and the drive worked fine after - samsung sent me a new replacement propmtly and efficiently. I'll certainly stick with seagate for the forseeable future.

marc