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New Samsung F4 2TB, faulty?

L

llmercll

Senior member
I just recieved and formatted my new 2TB HDD. I checked smart and error tested and everything seems ok, but when I run HDtune my graphs are pretty wild. My other drives are nice and smooth, while these have big spikes.


http://img51.imageshack.us/i/samsung2tbspeeds.png/
http://img26.imageshack.us/i/smartdata.png/
http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/8924/hddsamsung2tbwtf.png
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/6522/50gb.png

Is this a sign of a bad drive? Should I RMA with newegg even though smart looks good and its showing no other issues?
 
Is this your system drive? Most likely your HDD is fine, but background I/O distorts the results.

Try running in Safe Mode with most background processes closed off. Otherwise, all the dozens of processes that run on Windows systems would continuously produce I/O on the HDD, which is clearly visible in your benchmarks.

Speeds on CDM look good though; so 1% there is a problem and 99% that your background processes prevent proper benchmarking.
 
I agree with mesa and also I suspect that the smaller buffer on these drives might contribute to those fluctuations.
 
sub.mesa said:
Is this your system drive? Most likely your HDD is fine, but background I/O distorts the results.

Try running in Safe Mode with most background processes closed off. Otherwise, all the dozens of processes that run on Windows systems would continuously produce I/O on the HDD, which is clearly visible in your benchmarks.

Speeds on CDM look good though; so 1% there is a problem and 99% that your background processes prevent proper benchmarking.
Click to expand...

^^ This - if you're benchmarking the drive your OS is on, then you're doing it wrong. Mount as secondary drive, then run benchmarks on it, make sure that no windows scheduled tasks are going on while you're doing it (for example, disk defragmenter).
 
llmercll said:
Nope, it's secondary. I just formatted, theres nothing on it. I closed every application on my PC when I did the tests, nothing was running. My two other hard drives were just fine when I tested them in the same time period. Look to the right in the pic below.

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/8924/hddsamsung2tbwtf.png
Click to expand...

To be honest the performance doesn't look all that bad. Keep in mind it's a 5400 rpm drive, and occasional dips are normal as the drive head is occasionally auto adjusted by the firmware.
 
I agree that the performance is good, when sending files I get 75-85MBps transferring from my WD black, and the speed doesn't spike like in the graphs, it stays pretty constant. If thats the context you were putting it in, anyway.

It's just the way the graphs spike and lack consistency that bothers me. I've seen graphs from another persons F4 and they are nice like my other hard drives. I just don't know if these "ugly, crazy" looking graphs could be a precursor to premature failure, or if it means nothing.

Another thing I noticed is "program fail count" in smart is rising rapidly. It was at 385 when I first booted the drive, now it's at 2125.
 
If you get spikes in hdtune in safe mode then its a wire problem.. disconnect sata wire and connect again make sure its strongly firmly pressed in on both ends. Ive had this issue with spiikes and was fixed by doing the above.

That is a horrible graph drive is much faster then that. 4mbps as loweset ,, your lowest shouldnt be below 60mbps..

Something is up,, do the wire thing also change SATA port to another one. give it diff sata power and try it.
 
Sweet your benchmarks look normal. Do not buy into this synthetic benchmark it really doesnt mean nothing. For example your drive is 11ms or 10ms confirmed in specs and it shows 15ms so that is wrong. Dont believe it. Notice how hd tune benchmark goes down and down and down from the start its fast, then gets slower. Its taxing your drive. dont look at those numbers.

Alto they look pretty right. Try this in safe mode

Crystal Disk Mark free app ,,,, and run that in safe mode then well know whats up.

A better synthetic benchmark is Passmark Diskmark bench. gl
 
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/3378/cableswap.png

OK I swapped cables with another drive of mine that gave great graphs, booted up in safe mode, and ran it 5 times in a row. Again, it starts out great, and gets more erratic around the 3rd run, though it does seem less severe using different cables.

So can someone who really knows their stuff give me an rma recommendation? safe mode results are good, but the more i run it, the worse they get. They still aren't that bad though, at least compared to my graphs in regular win7, which are terrible. and then theres program fail count, which is at 2167 and rising, but I'm not sure how significant that is. If it matters, I formatted the drive as UPT rather than MBR, and don't have the drive screwed in...could that cause it?

thanks!
 
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Ok here is what you can do.

I still say the drive is normal functioning full power of it after looking at the screenie.

Yes your speed will go down and down,, its thrashing your HD . your consistent on that last hd tune pic. Try Crystal Disk mark free no installation app. run that 3 times in safe mode and capture the highest results,, then well know for sure if hd is ok or not. As for program fail count 2167 I dont know about that but here is what you can do.

I say you do a low level format and possibly change the cluster size

There are many free apps that do low level formatting which means data can never be recovered if you sell drive to someone . The drive is wiped. max low level format is one app,,, also you can change the cluster size with Partion Wizard ,, change sector to 4 instead of default 8 which is 4kb ...... get back to me... thx mercil
 
The SMART-value is odd though; i have no clue what it means, since this property should only apply to SSDs; not to HDDs! And your HDD also isn't a hybrid HDD, so this is all quite confusing.

The vibrations could indeed cause bad seeking performance, but that shouldn't affect sequential I/O too much. Still you should use 4 screws to give the HDD more stability and better heat transfer as well.

Could you also test HDTune with a larger blocksize? You can set this somewhere; try the largest size and re-run under both normal Windows and safe-mode. If that gives you a smooth graph you should be fine. But there still is the possibility the disk is having a problem; though erratic performance can be the result of many things. Further analysis would be recommended, and make sure you keep good backups especially on 'suspicious' drives, which unfortunately also applies to your new disk, until you can attribute the odd results and SMART property to something else.

If you did not had that SMART value, i may not have suspected much. But i distrust anything that i don't know or not familiar with. Put strain on the HDD for the couple weeks, if it's about to fail then it better fail now before you really start trusting this device. If all you get is the Program Fail Count and it continues to work; well then keep using it. But please, do invest in a good backup solution, HDDs due to their mechanical nature are unpredictable and valuable data shouldn't be trusted to just one storage device; you need backups! With disks this cheap now, buying two 2TB disks instead of one may be alot better, and if that second HDD could be in another system on the LAN (in your house) that would be best!

Cheers,
-sub
 
sub.mesa said:
The SMART-value is odd though; i have no clue what it means, since this property should only apply to SSDs; not to HDDs! And your HDD also isn't a hybrid HDD, so this is all quite confusing.
Click to expand...

oh right, the smart error...
well, nobody else has the smart error on their samsung F4... so that IS a problem. I would get it replaced under warranty. simply put "drive gives SMART error" in description of your problem for the RMA.
 
Unless you have bad sectors which a low level format cant fix then RMA drive, other then that keep it your benchmarks are fine. I would really like to see Crystal disk mark run in safe mode just to be sure. gl

For example


crystal512.jpg
 
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I ordered another one, that'll make things a lot easier for me. I'll probably end up RMAing my current drive. I don't wont all those smart errors on a brand new drive, f that. program fail count is up to 21000 btw. from 305 last night.

What are important factors when selecting a boot drive? how would the f4 do as a boot drive, say compared to a western digital caviar black 1tb? the f4 has faster reads, thats for sure. is there some "snappiness" factor that a 7200rpm drive has that a 5400rpm drive doesn't? or is it just access time, which is roughly similar for both drives. the f4 performs damn nice for a 5400rpm drive.
 
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Oh wow I didnt know thath llmercll yes definitely RMA the drive,, if its giving smart errors like that and getting more and more soon it will die. Soo ya good job, get another one return this. Youll be set.

Just be sure when you get the new drive to handle with care and dont shake it,, screw it on tightly to the chassis both sides. Make sure SATA cable is firmly in on both ends and youll be set. Your gonna get the same benchmark scores but at least it wont have smart errors or bad sectors.... GL my friend.
 
tweakboy said:
Unless you have bad sectors which a low level format cant fix then RMA drive
Click to expand...

low level format cannot be performed in drives made in the past 15 years or so. Modern drives have such miniaturization that the low level format is performed on the platters by specialized hardware before they are assembled into a drive.
 
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Second drive is coming in tomorrow. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

Anyone know if newegg will send me my replacement drive first, or at least cross ship?
 
llmercll said:
I ordered another one, that'll make things a lot easier for me. I'll probably end up RMAing my current drive. I don't wont all those smart errors on a brand new drive, f that. program fail count is up to 21000 btw. from 305 last night.

What are important factors when selecting a boot drive? how would the f4 do as a boot drive, say compared to a western digital caviar black 1tb? the f4 has faster reads, thats for sure. is there some "snappiness" factor that a 7200rpm drive has that a 5400rpm drive doesn't? or is it just access time, which is roughly similar for both drives. the f4 performs damn nice for a 5400rpm drive.
Click to expand...
I would think that the WD Black would be faster than the F4 as a boot drive.

7200rpm gives a faster seek time along with faster sequential reads and writes. It basically makes everything faster, with the main thing you'll notice being the seek times.

TBH most of the high capacity hard drives sold these days are 5400rpm and aren't all that well suited as boot drives.

If you can wait, WD should soon come out with single platter 750gb drives that should be quite fast if they release them at 7200rpm.

Otherwise, your options are limited. I've heard that Seagate's >1TB drives tend to fail, and Samsung has a lousy warranty.

I'd say stick to WD. The WD Blue drives are decent as well.
 
Yes, F4 320GB single platter ,, Im loving it my thunderbird used to take 4 second to launch on WDC SE 320GB ,, with this thunderbird launches in 1 second and half I have a 280MB inbox btw.

also pictures when zoomed some would lag a bit just a bit, now theres no lag.

I dont know 750GB on a single platter, I doubt they can match F4 320GB single platter which is one of the fastest mechanical drives out there 155read 155mbps write , 4.07 latency and 8.9 seek time. thx beast!
 
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