Samsung Spinpoint F1 - 1 TB of trouble

[NewsBot]

I wonder if any of you have this speedy Spinpoint F1 drive (HD103UJ)? 110 MB/s is pretty nice without RAID. However I haven't even got around to*using it*yet and I'm on my second now.

 

Thing is I read from newegg that some, quite a few apparently, of these get errors in the self diagnostic util provided by Samsung (hutil).*Reports say none of the errors show in other diagnostic tools,*DIY tests*or SMART attributes*.*Incase you do get one and run the tests, here's what to expect:

 

All drives seem*to have ecc error on "check M.C.". Possible incompat with the diagnostic util v2.1 but not absolutely certain yet, if you only have this error then you've "lucked out" as most have more errors than this.

 

"Simple surface scan - ecc error" This I believe is a heads up that when you run the full read surface scan you'll get a whole lot of errors.

 

Even if you don't get that error, run the full scan, there could well be errors.

 

"full read surface scan" This takes 3 hours, if you don't get any errors then you're lucky sob. (see below for native size comparison, the bad sectors might be already taken out of the size?)

 

Possible errors doing the full scan:

 

1. ecc error, very common *these may show up in SMART as hardware ecc error. They tend to stick around even if you do the full erase.* I had few of these on my first drive and the m.c. one.

 

2. Sector error, less common,*hangs for a while when attempting to read these sectors. Doing erase should hide these but in my long experience these tend to spread so instead of doing full erase send it for replacement is my advice.

 

3. Sector ID not found, seen sometimes with sector error.

 

 

Drive size and "native size" in LBA and MB. The first drive I had was around 1 MB bigger than the 2nd that had those sector errors. You can compare the LBA numbers in hutil options/drive information to see if there were already lot of bad sectors when the drive left the previous tester.

 

These drives were dated 12/2007. Unless reliability is not an issue I'd wait couple months to see if they manage to improve things though I believe what Samsung will do is just try to hide the bad sectors better. Worse possibility is that they already did that but during the trip to the retailer from the factory the issue just got worse. Infact between two full scans there were more ecc errors on a second scan a day later on the first drive.

 

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And what if you have no errors? You probably do soon. I have put data with checksums on drives before, put the drive away for a year and it doesn't match the checksum anymore. Teaches me for using HDD for archiving ...

 

 

 

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