Hey guys, I've got a 1Tb samsung drive, only 5-6months old tops. Yesterday while in windows 7 x64, a message box came up telling me that one of my drives was about to fail and advised me to back up and replace, then when I rebooted it came up on the post S.M.A.R.T. status was BAD!! So I have backed up all my stuff off that drive, and about to start the RMA procedure. Just wondering, as this drive hasnt failed YET, is it going to cause a problem during RMA, and is there anything i can do to fully test the drive to find out if it is fixable(i know you should replace at the first sign so as not to lose valuble data, but am planning a major storage redisgn in the new year.) Many Thanks Iain Merry Xmas
Out of all the drives, Samsung 1tb's in my opinion are the most reliable. Yours is the first HD103UJ (I take it thats the model you have) that I have ever heard of having a problem, likewise with the replacement model the HD103SJ. Thats not to say HDD's don't fail, just look how Seagate and Western Digital have faired in the past. Take in to consideration though the number of drives being sold, the failure rate is actually very low unless they completely muff it like Seagate did with their drives recently. Despite what is claimed, it is vitally important to keep drives cool, the Samsungs do run very cool! Another consideration is power profiles. Turning the hard drive off to save power is only good if the drive is rarely used, its not a good thing for the drive to constantly turn on and off which happens when its set to 5 mins like on some computers. Find out what problem your HDD failed in the Smart test. Importantly too! CHECK that your sata cables are connected properly and that they are not faulty. Whilst they don't affect the SMART test directly, a faulty power cable can do damage to the drive. Additionally, if you use a molex to Sata adaptor, make sure you don't have other devices such as fans etc running off the same power rail. They can create noise in that rail that can affect drive operation, not to mention supply insufficient voltage. You don't want to RMA the drive to find that its how you set up the drive connections that caused the problem, or by having insufficient voltage.
Thank you guys for your responses. Have been at work so not had time to fully look into it. Could be tomorrow evening at the earliest i actually get time to do so. Have downloaded the samsung tool and am going to run it now, cheers 2cents. Have half arsed checked the cables but not to the extent of removing and replacing them, just reseating them. I hope the samsungs live up to their reputation, but have probably been asking for trouble for a while. Have been running 5 sata drive's, with a quad core cpu yada yada yada on just a generic 600w psu, and the wiring isn't the best as you can probably imagine. An the kicker is that im getting a server in the new year i was just going to slot this drive straight in. Hopefully it will be something simple...... Keep you guys posted.
Ok tried that samsung test tool and it wouldn't load, done a little bit of its thing then threw me out to a dos prompt saying something along the lines of, memory loaded to c:\ out of memory Took out the drive to get model and serial, and although "warm" it wasn't too warm. Too tired to do any more tonight. It is the HD103UJ. Fingers crossed.
The samsung tool didnt work because you need to run it from a pure DOS enviroment not from within the OS You need to put the Hutil 210.exe file onto a Floppy disk and then reboot your computer making sure the BIOS is set to boot from Floppy first.
Thanks for your reply, i downloaded the bootable cd image and booted my comp from it so should of worked. Will be looking into it further tomorrow