samsung 80gb hard drives

[ratdude747]

ok, this is just a sanity check...

i have a samsung 80gb drive pulled from a dead dell. i put in a pIII compaq i have.

i go to install xubuntu, and it runs well until it goe to access the drive, and then it gets really slow. when it stops, the speed returns to normal.

are samsung drives know to be crap? it seems that the EVERYTHING lags... even the xfce equivlent of the hourglass gets slow with hard disk activity.

one other question- would a defective cable do that?

i would test the possibilities but i need to go to bed... anybody have any ideas?

ps- this compaq had recapped a year back. it had ran fine up until i installed the drive (and swapped cables due to it being stripped of parts for a while).

[shovenose]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

Is it on the right jumper settings? Master, slave, cs?

[ratdude747]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

yes... the drive works, it just seems to cause the system to lag. i am 150% sure the jumpers are right.

[c_hegge]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

From my experience samsung HDDs are throwaway junk. I don't touch them.

[mockingbird]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

Run fsck on it. Also recompile your kernel and make sure you're using the correct IDE drivers. Should be PIIX4E for BX chipset. I don't remember what the name of the utility is but there's one to check the drive's status. Make sure it's running in at least UDMA33 (UltraDMA 2) mode and not some PIO mode.

Those old Spinpoint drives are slow as heck as they are.

[yyonline]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

ok, this is just a sanity check...
one other question- would a defective cable do that?

Bad cable can cause DMA CRC errors, which force the drive to retransmit the data. A bad controller on either end of the cable can also cause the same errors.

In addition to all the other suggestions, take a look at the SMART data for the drive. That should tell you a lot about whether the drive is malfunctioning.

The ubuntu disk utility should be able to read your SMART data, provided your controller supports it.

[BigTroll]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

i had a 80gig spinpoint and it died it was my only samsung, ive heard good things about their new drives, but at this point i'll stick to Western Digital and Seagate.

[shovenose]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

yaeh ive heard new samsung druves are nice, but i just replaced a bad 640gb samsung in someones 2yr-old dell tower,...

[ratdude747]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

i have installed various flovors of buntu on it... this drive's addition is what screws it up.
i might check SMART...

it is a via chipset... a compaq presario 7000 to be exact. oddball model, as it is full atx with firewire.

[seanc]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

I concur, read the SMART data.
Post it here if you don't understand it.

All new Ubuntu disks come with Disk Utility which make things easiser to unsterstand, it will tell you if you have bad sectors. If it's bad enough, it will pop up balloons and scream at you as soon as the machine boots into Gnome (I don't use any other Window Managers).

I've had experience with 2 x 80GB Samsung Spinpoint drives, both IDE.
One stopped spinning up. Froze it, bashed it, it eventually came back to life. Did the same with a 500GB SATA Seagate last week - managed to get a complete clone. Damn thing is still working and showing no errors in the SMART data - maybe logic board fault.
The other one reported the spin-up time as failing SMART. I immediately cloned it to a brand new 80GB Seagate. 2 days later, that died too and I had to play the data recovery game

[shovenose]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

yeah just stick to wd, and avoid the seagate/maxtor, hitachi/ibm, and samsung junk, and youll be fine

[seanc]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

Shovenose, I have boxes of failed everything, you're never safe.
Samsung are the worst though.

[shovenose]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

on a scale of 1-10, 10=best 1=worst

1. seagate/maxtor
2. samsung
3.
4. ibm/hitachi
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10. wd


yes, im sort of a wd ftw!...fanboy i guess. and i have seen fried wd drives

[seanc]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

Really? I'd stick Seagate at 8, 2001 - 2006 Maxtors at 4, current Seagate/Maxtor at 7.
WD 9.
Hitachi from 2006 onwards at 8.
There is no 10, except maybe WD Enterprise.
Samsung 1.

[c_hegge]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

on a scale of 1-10, 10=best 1=worst

1. seagate/maxtor
2. samsung
3.
4. ibm/hitachi
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10. wd


yes, im sort of a wd ftw!...fanboy i guess. and i have seen fried wd drives

I personally find Seagate more reliable, but WD are pretty good too.

1. Hitachi Deathstars
2. Samsung
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9. WD
10. Seagate

[shovenose]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

imo all seageates are junk. anytime i (rarely) buy a new drive its always wd, and ive never had one fail yet (one is in a friend's 24/7 badly cooled ibm, still going strong 5yrs later (i was 10 at the time, it was one of the first pc fixes i did)

[seanc]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

How many have you bought?

[shovenose]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

3. but i get many used from work.
i will investigate the bad hdd bin at work next saturday if i remember and see if there are more wds or seagates...in the past i have observed approximately a 2:1 ratio in the bad hdd bin of seagates and wds respectively

[seanc]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

Out of the last 100 or so WD drives that I've bought at work, I can recall a few failures
2 x 1TB Caviar Green SATA, 1 x 250GB Caviar Blue SATA, 1 x 320GB Caviar Blue SATA, 1 x 640GB Caviar Black SATA, 1 x 250GB Blue SATA Notebook Drive, 1 x 160GB Caviar SATA.

With most of those WD drives, data was lost. With Segate, I can almost always recover data.

I have lots more Seagate in my bin than WD.
That's because the PCs from 2002 to 2007 always had Seagate. WD started trickling in, in 2007, I turned the tap on when Seagate had the bad firmware debacle in 2008, early 2009.

[toastygoodness]

Re: samsung 80gb hard drives

i'd place toshiba decently high. but samsung are serionsly trash. old seagate was too, but they are better now. WD has stayed about the same for me. its usually reliable, but if it fails, you will still be able to rescue the data and usually their warranty service is nice. hitachi are still deathstars, but i think their enterprise-class are good.