Samsung HD103UJ Spinpoint F1 - Write Issues

[Thrungus]

HeXus is the place I come to get somin fixed and by that i've been looking all over the internet for an awnser and I always end up never finding the awnser

But the brains on the HeXus forum will provail?

I bought a Samsung HD103UJ Spinpoint F1 from Scan 3 weeks ago, everything was looking good and sounding even better! Untill one day, I booted up and it gave me a S.M.A.R.T error bad.

So RMA > Sent it back
The i recieved another 1
S.M.A.R.T error bad
So RMA > Sent it back

Now on my 3rd Samsung HD103UJ so you can tell how annoyed I am already

But it would seem I am recieving horrible write speeds (speeds of 3.1 mb\s or 1.2 mb\s are my favourite!) which is not useful as I'm attempting to use this HDD for HD Capturing.

So my Specs are:

Asus P5K Premium (Updated the BIOS etc.)
2GB OCZ 800mhz RAM
Western Digital 160GB HDD (Aswell as faulting Samsung HD103UJ)

.......

Sorry about the rambling but I really could do with this 3rd HDD working!

[Splash]

Hmmm... what PSU are you using? I'd say three duff disks in a row is pushing it a bit, so the chances are that something is killing them. What's airflow like in your case? What temperatures are your disks reporting?

[Thrungus]

Hmmm... what PSU are you using? I'd say three duff disks in a row is pushing it a bit, so the chances are that something is killing them. What's airflow like in your case? What temperatures are your disks reporting?

720W Corsair PSU
Temperatures are fine throughout the system, nothing abnormal.

I've heard that maybe its to do with a SATA issue? Although that would seem confusing because the other HDD is working fine

[Splash]

Care to elaborate on the "SATA issue"? The interface shouldn't be causing SMART errors on the disk...

The F1s don't have a jumper to limit to SATA1 speeds if that's what you mean, so you couldn't even have that on incorrectly.

[shaithis]

Trying removing the other hard drive (at least temporarily).

I've seen a lot of issues where newer and older SATA hard drives do not like co-existing with each other when connected to newer chipsets........

[Neo_VR]

Also try changing the SATA mode in the bios between IDE/AHCI - i have heard of incompatibilites between drives and chipsets (admittedly that was a seagate)

[neonplanet40]

i have that mobo with no problems...... although to be fair. i had three die on my one after the other only they were the 500gb version so yes it can happen.

[Thrungus]

Trying removing the other hard drive (at least temporarily).

I've seen a lot of issues where newer and older SATA hard drives do not like co-existing with each other when connected to newer chipsets........

Only have 2 HDDs (1 with vista on and the other is the 1TB)

Also try changing the SATA mode in the bios between IDE/AHCI - i have heard of incompatibilites between drives and chipsets (admittedly that was a seagate)

The pc won't boot under AHCI quite annoying.

Any more ideas?

[shaithis]

The pc won't boot under AHCI quite annoying.

Any more ideas?

Won't boot under AHCI?

Is that because of Windows drivers or because the system hangs during the disk detection at the BIOS screen?

[Thrungus]

Won't boot under AHCI?

Is that because of Windows drivers or because the system hangs during the disk detection at the BIOS screen?

detects the disks then black screen and restarts.
I think it flashed a blue screen tho, although not the full vista death blue screen

[shaithis]

If it flashes blue before rebooting, then its probably because the AHCI drivers are not loaded in Windows.

There is a thread here somewhere that details how to make changes in windows before turning AHCI on. It has to be worth trying it.

[Thrungus]

Running Vista and that guide is for XP - shame
Also thought I would post a Disk Speed Test. Check out those amazing Write Speed Results!

[Thrungus]

A kind bump

[BiBenDuM]

Up ^^' sorry for getting this thread back but I must say I've got the exact same problem.

Asus P5K Premium and HD103UJ disks faulting.
3 of these disks I've bought 10 months ago were sent back to RMA one after another because of S.M.A.R.T. failure ... and the same problems seemed to start again soon after I replaced them so I decided to search for a hardware issue.
(I could fill up them up to about 70-90% depending of the disk and then the problems begin : the disk seems to lock-up and copy progress stops)
These are not system drives, I'm on a separate Adaptec pcie raid card for the system.
The most interesting thing is :
- I bought 3 new Western Digital WD1001FALS to replace the Samsung disks and there is no problem with them.
- I tested my 3 HD103UJ (the new ones) with Samsung tools and low format : no errors / S.M.A.R.T. good (on another computer)
- I plugged one of the HD103UJ in a esata dock connected to a e-sata pcie card and got no problem with it.
- Tried the same thing on one of the P5K e-sata and could not even format the drive.
- My system is AHCI but I tried to get back to IDE = same issues.
- Didn't try on XP but I first got this issue on Vista 32 and now on Seven 64 ...

So that looks like a hardware or firmware compatibility issue between P5K and theses HDD.

Did someone find a solution to this or are we the only 2 people who got this problem ? ^^'

Thanks for reading me

edit ... sorry I've just looked forward on google and seen many people got this problem, many of them on P5K but also people on AMD platforms so ... could it be a software issue like vista or seven kernel compatibility ?
Did someone made some tests under XP ? sorry again ^^

[Jace007]

How about turning SMART off? its just another over head for the system, if you backup your data on a regular basis or have Raid, you can live without it. step's you can take to reduce errors in the 1st place, include when installing the HDD, dont move it around, installl hdd wiht care, make sure you have a decent psu and decent power coming to your system, run a Defrag & chkdsk on the system every 2 months or so, never move a hdd when its powered on

[peterb]

AMART is a logging function carried out by the drive, so the overhead is minimal, and remains a useful tool. I'd agree with te point about backing up, but RAID is not a substitute for backing up.

While hard disks should be handled carefully, they are surprisingly robust, so unless they are dropped they are unlikely to come to much damage during installation. However in this case it doesn't appear to be a hard drive fault as such - three faulty drives, bought at different times, are unlikely to exhibit the same fault.

There were early reports of incompatibilities between some Samsung drives and some mobos, but I thought they had been resolved now. If an updated BIOS is available for the board, that may solve the problem, but read the details of the upgrade to see if it does address that particular problem.