Samsung multiple Hard Disk failures

[philipbain]

I was just wanting to see if anyone else has been experiencing problems with the durability of Samsung hard drives. For years I have used Samsung drives as they were always highly rated and competitively priced. However in recent times I have had to get no less than 4 drives replaced under warranty! Samsung's warranty service is very good, the only cost to me has been sending them to Samsung, the replacement drives are always delivered by UPS, but I would much rather they didn't fail in the first instance. I have also checked the installation of the drives to see if that was causing problems but my Akasa case keeps the hard drives in a good airstream and I have checked the temperature of the drives in operation and they don't run hot. This failure rate has already had an influence on my purchasing as when I bought my latest storage drive I went for a 2TB Western Digital WD20EARS Caviar Green, the first non-Samsung conventional hard drive I have bought in years. Am I just unlucky with these Samsung drives or have any of you experienced something similar?

[Behemoth]

It appears to me that I read more about failing Samsungs than I do any other brand. In all fairness though I suspect it's the same of any brand. Allbeit WD, Hitachi, Seagate etc.

They all fail in one way or another, primarily due to the high numbers of the drives produced.

[Sputnik]

A weak/defective PSU can cause regular hard drive failures.

[nibbler]

Samsungs are among the best selling, so the more you sell, the more you hear about them. The percentage that fail is probably the same, but it's just that there are more of them to hear about (if that makes sense to you, and if it's true that they sell more).

[Behemoth]

There's no denying they are certainly one of the best selling drives on the market, and some of the cheapest too.

Agreed on a weak/faulty PSU. I've lost several hard drives in this way.

[Anteries]

is it take particular size of drive that has been failing? I understand there's a slight problem with the 2 GB model. It has faulty firmware, which as far as I understand causes data loss during certain smart tests. There is a fix for it, but worryingly it said this will help with the problem. Not this will totally fix the problem.

[]EGG[]

Be interesting to know what model and size you are talking about.

Last year I used to return on average at least 10 individual 80GB/160GB Samsung HDD's a week due to them dying.

[Bhavv]

I've owned the following Samsung drives:

2x 500 Gb T166
2x 1 Tb F1
2x 1 Tb F3
2x 2 Tb F4

I've had one T166 and one F1 fail after some time, but the data was recoverable and they got replaced without any hassle. The T166 I managed to get replaced directly through Samsung and I had a replacement drive within 48 hours. The F1 I had to RMA through Scan, and it took about a week to get it replaced (I ended up buying the F3's here as replacements, backing up my stuff and selling the F1 and the replacement I got later).

The only problem I have now with Samsung drives is that the direct manufacturer warranty is not available on the OEM drives that are sold everywhere. I would gladly pay extra to have those replacements within 48 hours, but they dont provide them on OEM drives.

The F3s and F4s are currently doing very well. I have the F3s in Raid 0 for my games, and they are the fastest HDD you can get for Raid 0. I use one of the F4s to create a backup image every month, and the other to store everything else. For windows I use a 64 Gb crucial C300.

[]EGG[]

Bhavv - Is the Crucial C300 64GB a good choice of SSD for having Windows 7 and your apps on? Is there anything that you shouldn't do with this specific drive as I've heard stuff about not writing or extracting to it for storage or something, can you clear this up please?

[Bhavv]

Bhavv - Is the Crucial C300 64GB a good choice of SSD for having Windows 7 and your apps on? Is there anything that you shouldn't do with this specific drive as I've heard stuff about not writing or extracting to it for storage or something, can you clear this up please?

I dont know, I just got it because it was Sata 6 Gb/s.

I have windows, drivers, and apps on it (web browser, adobe, virus scan), and it seems completely fine.

You shouldnt be using any SSD for storage, they arent meant to be used as storage drives.

[spoon_]

Desktop class drives aren't meant to run in RAID or 24/7...

[GT-R]

Me and a mate bought 2 F1's a couple of years ago they both failed when installing OS, Returned them, went western digital and never looked back.

[kalniel]

Samsung are at least as good as any other premium manufacturer in my experience for hard drives. What I have seen happen (not just for Samsung) are drives purchased in batches failing at similar times. This could either be due to a faulty batch, or even something as mundane as the crate being subject to some external stress during the warehousing. So you can either take the car bulb approach and change them all when one fails, or spread the purchasing out over a period of time to minimise the risk.

[Anteries]

There is an evidence void, Samsung Drives are great. they are all about the same, WD, Seagate etc.

[Cryptik]

iv been buying WD drives for years. still got all of them in multiple pcs total of about 10 drives i think and my main machine and server are on 24/7. there not all server drives either everything from greens to enterprise re4s.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It will be interesting to know whether the faulty drives the OP had were in the same PC.

Sometimes a PSU issue can cause hard drive problems IIRC.