[Spook Tooth]

Yes, it's the latest 1 Terabyte model from Samsung. They've reviewed it alongside other 1TB models over at The Register/hardware/storage channel and it comes out tops, hence the decision to buy it from Scan the other day.

Though there appear to be a fair few problems for people in RMAing 1TB drives, I didn't think I'd apply somehow (unless I was unlucky) as I'm simply to use it as a storage drive and not as part of a RAID configuration.

My motherboard, Gigabyte GA965P is revision one and uses the latest bios update (F12). No other bios updates are forthcoming as the 965P Intel chipset, as we all know, has been superceded and then some. It's not terribly old though - just a little over a year's ownership for me. It supports SATA II natively. I don't have any other boards with SATA ONE support - the whole trying the jumper settings thing was simply to eliminate any lingering doubt about the drive's setup as one last attempt to get it working.

My motherboard has 3 SATA DVD drives attached to it and I use 2xHitachi 320GB SATA II drives in RAID 0 configuration as my main setup. I've tried attaching just the Samsung 1TB drive in an attempt to load Windows to it using the normal Windows XP setup from CD method but still it comes up as being a shade under 8GB in size.

The Samsung hard drive won't format either, neither long format or quick format methods. It simply gets to the end and reports there has been an error. Scan disk won't run on it either.

There's nothing left to check for me. Unfortunately I cannot check the drive on another motherboard as I'd like to do. Everyone I know locally is still using IDE as their hard drive interface. I aim to upgrade my motherboard and processor in the next few months but that will likely be a little too late for RMA purposes, won't it?

Thanks for looking in. I appreciate your time. If you find anything let me know or if Scan can simply replace this drive with a known working Samsung 1TB model, that would be excellent. Ta.

Ps. Have know submitted a 'returns query', thanks Carlh. This doesn't mean I won't be still be looking for further details on how I can get my BIOS/PC to see the drive and correctly report its size/format properly. So please help me if you can fellas - cheers.