[mythtv-users] WARNING: Samsung F4 owners / warning. Disable smartmontools

Andre mythtv-list at dinkum.org.uk
Sat Dec 4 17:21:01 UTC 2010


On 4 Dec 2010, at 16:29, Brian Wood wrote:

> On Saturday, December 04, 2010 09:23:01 am John Drescher wrote:
>> It is now known that the samsung F4 has a buggy firmware that causes
>> 64 sectors of data to randomly be discarded from the write cache when
>> an ATA command to identify the device is executed during a disk
>> write. I have 3 F4 and I have verified that the issue does exist on
>> my drives. Samsung is  aware of this bug and is working on a fix.
>> 
>> http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlo
>> cks
> 
> Oh great, another HDD vendor off my list.

Is there anyone who can be trusted to supply a disk that actually works!

I crossed Samsung off a long while ago thanks to the F1. (3 out of 6 HD501LJ's still working, 4 of 4 HD103UJ's drop off the bus occasionally.) so far 6 HD154UI's working ok as long as they are not plugged into a Marvell 6145 sata controller.
Seagate (1.5TB drama & seizing spindles, I have 2 out of 4 seagate 500GB still working).
Hitachi, I have a 1TB HDS721010KLA330 which randomly loses it's partition table but only when connected to an Adaptec sata controller! Otherwise it's good :-P
WD, (power management bug).
Many Many dead Maxtor Diamondmax 9 drives, usually a week out of warranty.

No we don't get lots of earthquakes and thunderstorms here.

Does that leave anyone? The Intel SSD I bought last week hasn't failed yet ;-)

Thanks for the warning, I was about to buy 2x 2TB drives for a raid 1 next week, I think I'll be buying two different manufacturers, hopefully when they break it will be in different ways and hopefully at different times!

Andre


> 
> I figure if a vendor would let something like this slip by there's no 
> telling what else they have missed.
> 
> Of course other vendors probably have similar problems, but in cases 
> where such negligence has been demonstrated, I just stay away from them.
> 
> It's funny how many problems seem to happen with drives advertised as 
> "eco-friendly" or "green", as opposed to plain old regular drives.
> 
> I speak as someone who once owned a lot of Micropolis drives. Once 
> bitten...
> 
> 
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