Samsung F3's....anyone else had issues?

[Agent]

Have had 2 of these, both have failed within a month.

First was from Scan. That was clicking and then died at the BIOS stage. Before this bad sectors started to show up.

Second was from Ebuyer. This has stopped loading data correctly and had exactly the same issue - bad sectors.

The SMART data (viewed through the SMART Tool in Parted Magic) showed that SMART was also logging these issues.

Now I'm very careful with disks. They have their own enclosure and are never moved once installed. Because of the issue with the first drive I did the long self-test with Samsungs own testing tool (ESTOOL) before putting any data on it. It passed fine with no issues, which suggests the bad sectors are happening after.

HDTune / HDTach was showing huge spikes once the issues started to happen, and this mirrored the OS performance I was experiencing.

Really not happy about it. I had always found Sammys to be very good before this.

[Biscuit]

i have 3 of them and i have had nothing wrong at all. I dont want to jynx it but you might have just been extremely unlucky!

[watercooled]

I noticed a non-zero value for the SMART Raw_Read_Error_Rate as in this thread, not sure if it's related.

[Terbinator]

Mine (F3 500GB) has been fine since I've had it, about 6 months i think.

[Skulltrail]

I've had a 1TB F3 on (admittedly light duties) for a few months now without issue.

[Sputnik]

I have a pair of F3 1TB's that have been run for 3600 hours and an F1 1TB which has done 8300 hours.

[Funkstar]

I have three 1.5TB F2's sitting here that will drop randomly from my PERC 5/i RAID card and from the last motherboard I tried them with. i keep meaning to run the Samsung diagnostics on them.

I, personally, won't be buying Samsung again.

[marktime]

Had an F1 fail on me within a year and I said at the time I wouldn't trust Samsungs again, but I couldn't resist getting an F3 when the prices started to drop. Having said that, I still don't trust them for long term storage and back everything up regularly. Having said THAT, I don't think they're necessarily any more unreliable overall than any other manufacturer: WD, Seagate, Maxtor, IBM have all failed on me over the years.

[Biscuit]

Hmm this is starting to make me think twice about my 4 x 2tb F3 RAID 5 set up i have in the works. Whats the best alternative atm then, seagate?

[Solex]

I have a 1TB F3, it seems to be running fine atm, maybe you got a bad batch. I wouldn't go for seagate as with my experience with them i had 3 dead HDD as soon as they arrived at my doorstep. I read somewhere in a magazine that Seagate has a 56% fail rate compare to other drives and Maxtor owns Seagates (or maybe the other way round) which makes matters worst...

[Terbinator]

Hmm this is starting to make me think twice about my 4 x 2tb F3 RAID 5 set up i have in the works. Whats the best alternative atm then, seagate?

I wouldn't buy Seagate as I personally have had issues with them and i <3 my cool running F3, however if your considering a change the WD RE drives are suppose to be top-draw for stability IIRC.

[jim]

I've been buying Samsungs for years now, never had a failure or bad sectors. Probably owned 10 or so in total, F1s through to F3s.

[watercooled]

Drives from all MFRs fail, and all MFRs produce bad batches, if you get a few bad drives it's just bad luck really (with the exception of the bad batches which gave Hitachi a bad reputation, for example) so I wouldn't let it put you off a brand. If there are compatibility issues with RAID cards or something it's a different story, of course but RAID card often publish drive compatibility lists to help avoid this.

[Sputnik]

I have three 1.5TB F2's sitting here that will drop randomly from my PERC 5/i RAID card and from the last motherboard I tried them with. i keep meaning to run the Samsung diagnostics on them.

I, personally, won't be buying Samsung again.

Is that a Drive fault or a compatibility issue? I had some Maxtor's (yes, I know) that did this and it was just they did not work with the boards I tried them with. Actually I killed one of the drives as if dropped connection half way through formatting and didn't work afterwards.

[Funkstar]

Is that a Drive fault or a compatibility issue? I had some Maxtor's (yes, I know) that did this and it was just they did not work with the boards I tried them with. Actually I killed one of the drives as if dropped connection half way through formatting and didn't work afterwards.

Well I need to try them in another system first, so that will be a hardware RAID card, an AMD system and an Intel system. If they still have problems that really goes beyond a "compatibility issue" and is simply a functional one.

[Sputnik]

Drives from all MFRs fail, and all MFRs produce bad batches, if you get a few bad drives it's just bad luck really (with the exception of the bad batches which gave Hitachi a bad reputation, for example) so I wouldn't let it put you off a brand. If there are compatibility issues with RAID cards or something it's a different story, of course but RAID card often publish drive compatibility lists to help avoid this.

I agree with all of that. I've had WD, Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung and Toshiba (probably some others that I've forgotten about) and never had one completely fail (let's hope I'm not tempting fate).

Some of the old ones that did 24/7 got noisy bearings and one of the Maxtors did a bit of clicking when I benchmarked it but, It still worked ok afterwards.

A friend of mine had lots of drive failures and I'm pretty sure it was down to the PSU he was using.