Is my Samsung Spinpoint 1TB Goosed??

[davidcrofter]

I have recently just discovered a major problem with my 1TB Samsung Spinpoint Hard Drive, I use it purely for storage purposes as I have a 500GB Samsung Spinpoint with OS and all programmes installed.

I have quite a few media and dvd folders stored on this disc both in ISO and DVD Folder format, but when deciding to burn a few to dvd 3 or 4 so far have been acting very strangely:
I Burn the DVD Folder in Nero using Taiyo Yuden Discs at 12x speed, now Nero says it is burning at 12x speed but the actual burn process can take over an hour on these 3 or 4 files (that I have found, could be others). Now when I try and copy these 4 folders back over to my other disc it comes up that it will take 4 hours to copy!! Strange thing is the actual burnt discs play fine in my dvd player.

I have checked the disc for errors using the Error-Checking Vista tool and also asked it to scan and recover bad sectors, now this did not seem like such a good idea when the programme seemed to stop half way through checking the files (stage 4) as I stopped it and reboot the pc but I could not stop the process of disc checking so let it run overnight ... well it finally completed after about 14 hours (stopped to a crawl at the same part as before) and found two bad file clusters. But after the test completed the PC just turned itself off not giving me any message of the status of the hard disc.

So I take it that this Samsung Drive has bad sectors in it or is starting to fail (never happened to me before!!) - if so what is the RMA process??

[CaptainCrash]

All hard drives have bad clusters, but they're normally remapped by the drive's firmware to a "spare" part of the drive, and the OS should never see them - if scanning tools such as chkdsk are picking up bad sectors it means that the number of them has grown to such an extent that the spare capacity has been completely used up, and they're now starting to eat into the capacity available to the OS.

So yes, I would say the drive is probably goosed - probably just a dud in the first place, unless maybe you gave it a knock while it was running, which could have caused a head crash. You could try running Samsung's ES-Tool (don't use HUTIL, it has issues with the 1TB F1), but I doubt if it will give you good news...

The RMA procedure will depend on the store you bought it from, there should be a returns link on their website (you simply fill in an online form for most of the big e-tailers).

[ash_rm]

Yeah I would try the Samsung tool, just to be sure.

Also try using ImgBurn for burning the DVD Folders.

[davidcrofter]

Thanks chaps, tried running the Samsung ES-Tool and as before it started picking up lots of errors at just below the 50% mark where it ground to a halt.

Looks like I will need to raise an RMA with Scan in the morning and try and salvage what I can in the meantime.

[SeveBC]

There is an worthwhile journal article 'Failure Trends in a large Disk Drive Population' research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf which makes an interesting read. Highest failure rates within the first year of use or at the end of the hard drive life, 4+ years.