I feel the need to inform the forum about some recent Samsung failures I've had as of late. I have recommended them in the past, but recent developments have me thinking twice.
First, the F1 1TB drive in my personal computer. It would work fine, no data corruption, except that every so often the hard drive light would come on, stay on, and the comptuer would freeze. This started happening after a few months, and with increasing frequency over time. It would happen maybe every other week to start out, then every other day, and when it got really bad it was every day. The temporary fix is to remove power to the computer entirely, and let it sit for a few minutes. The longer the better. Then it will work again for a while.
I looked up the problem on Google, and apparently the fix is to download the Samsung utility, and change the max transfer rate from SATA 300 to SATA 150. I did that and it fixed it entirely. It's been about a week now and it's been functioning perfectly. I didn't notice the difference in speed.
Second is a couple SP2504C Spinpoint P series 250GB drives. One of them developed random errors. The errors would show up copying a large, multi-GB file. The md5sum results of the original and the copy would be different. I thought the drive was just screwed up by a bad Antec that was in the computer. That is, until last week when I found another SP2504C with a similar issue. The data wouldn't corrupt as far as I could tell, but it would come up with an error 11 in the Windows event viewer. This means the driver detected an error in the disk controller. In both cases the fix was to replace the drive. A simple Linux "dd" command cloned the drive to other 250GB drives, at which point the errors went away. I hear the fix for these drives is also to lower the transfer rate from SATA 300 to SATA 150, although I have yet to try it.
Thought I'd keep everyone informed. It seems issues are limited to these two models, at least from what I've seen. But I'll be keeping my eyes open. I still consider Samsung to be a decent brand, but you've got to be aware of what the potential issues are during installation.
First, the F1 1TB drive in my personal computer. It would work fine, no data corruption, except that every so often the hard drive light would come on, stay on, and the comptuer would freeze. This started happening after a few months, and with increasing frequency over time. It would happen maybe every other week to start out, then every other day, and when it got really bad it was every day. The temporary fix is to remove power to the computer entirely, and let it sit for a few minutes. The longer the better. Then it will work again for a while.
I looked up the problem on Google, and apparently the fix is to download the Samsung utility, and change the max transfer rate from SATA 300 to SATA 150. I did that and it fixed it entirely. It's been about a week now and it's been functioning perfectly. I didn't notice the difference in speed.
Second is a couple SP2504C Spinpoint P series 250GB drives. One of them developed random errors. The errors would show up copying a large, multi-GB file. The md5sum results of the original and the copy would be different. I thought the drive was just screwed up by a bad Antec that was in the computer. That is, until last week when I found another SP2504C with a similar issue. The data wouldn't corrupt as far as I could tell, but it would come up with an error 11 in the Windows event viewer. This means the driver detected an error in the disk controller. In both cases the fix was to replace the drive. A simple Linux "dd" command cloned the drive to other 250GB drives, at which point the errors went away. I hear the fix for these drives is also to lower the transfer rate from SATA 300 to SATA 150, although I have yet to try it.
Thought I'd keep everyone informed. It seems issues are limited to these two models, at least from what I've seen. But I'll be keeping my eyes open. I still consider Samsung to be a decent brand, but you've got to be aware of what the potential issues are during installation.
<----Computer says I need more beer.
*grrr*
)
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