Samsung 2TB Drive

It seems my data drive has gone to the HD heaven. So I am looking at a new one. This caught my eye:-
Samsung HD204UI Spinpoint F4 2TB Hard Drive SATA 5400RPM 32MB Cache - OEM

Anyone any experience using 11.4 and this drive? I was concerned about a warning in the advert:
FOR USE WITH NAS DRIVES, WE RECOMMEND INSTALLING THIS FIRMWARE UPDATE BEFORE USING:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386

What does it mean?

Any help much appreciated.

John F.

Well do you have a NAS box? If not, don’t worry about it.

However I believe this is one of the new generation of drives with 4kB sectors and you should align partitions to 4kB boundaries to get max performance. There are various howtos about this on the Web.

Many thanks!

jfarrar I am not a big fan of Samsung hard drives and I wonder if there might be one faster for the same price? I recently purchased the following Hitachi with very good results:

Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 Inch 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA II 32 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02860

I got it for $58 a couple of weeks ago plus shipping and prices do vary but here is one link on the drive:

Amazon.com: Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 Inch 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA II 32 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02860: Electronics

All manufactures have hard drive failures I am sure, but Samsung is not on the top of my list. Why not check out the link and see what you think.

Thank You,

why would you want a 5400rpm drive instead of a 7200? would it not be slower?

why would you want a 5400rpm drive instead of a 7200? would it not be slower?
In general, 5400 rpm hard drives would be slower than a comparable 7200 rpm model. The size of the built-in disk cache must also be considered. 5400 rpm is the typical speed for laptops, though 7200 rpm units can be purchased. 7200 rpm units are more normal with Desktops, but “green hard drives” are often 5400 rpm and can use way less power, can even be less noisy and in general generate a lot less heat. It might even be a good match for a multimedia PC when heat, power consumption and noise are all things to avoid. I still do have one 5400 rpm drive installed myself even though you would want to go with a 7200 rpm hard drive if you have the choice.

Thank You,

I had already ordered the Samsung before this thread developed, so…

However, the OS disc in this machine is a Samsung which is several years old now, whilst the failed disc is a much newer Western Digital. So who knows… :wink:

Whoops, dead disc is a Seagate. Sorry to WD for dissing them (as I think the young folk say…)

ken yap wrote:
> Well do you have a NAS box? If not, don’t worry about it.

NO

This is very important.

Samsung produced some drive models that fail when the IDENTIFY command
is used used according to the specification. Specifically they will fail
if the smartctl utility is run with them, and in some other
circumstances as well.

The only solution is to update the firmware as described, but
unfortunately the updated firmware has the same version number as the
faulty firmware, so there’s no way to know if it was already done, DOH!

If you have a Samsung drive with a patch available, you should upgrade
the firmware.

FWIW, I’m a fan of Samsung drives and have several, thankfully not one
of these!

> However I believe this is one of the new generation of drives with 4kB
> sectors and you should align partitions to 4kB boundaries to get max
> performance. There are various howtos about this on the Web.

NO

This is very important.

Samsung produced some drive models that fail when the IDENTIFY command
is used used according to the specification. Specifically they will fail
if the smartctl utility is run with them, and in some other
circumstances as well.

The only solution is to update the firmware as described, but
unfortunately the updated firmware has the same version number as the
faulty firmware, so there’s no way to know if it was already done, DOH!

If you have a Samsung drive with a patch available, you should upgrade
the firmware.

FWIW, I’m a fan of Samsung drives and have several, thankfully not one
of these!
This is the kind of BS I am talking about concerning Samsung. Again, any hard drive could fail, but only Samsung could come up with something like this. Samsung has a huge Plant here in Austin and buys millions of dollars of stuff from the company I work for, but I am incredulous in any of their technologies are of real value and can come up with some incredible issues. It happens time and time again on all sorts of products.

My only other suggestion with hard drives is to stick with bare drives and stay away from pre-made external hard drives. It is OK to have an external drive as long as you matched it up with an external drive enclosure yourself. This then avoids yet other oddities with power saving and backup solutions not compatible with Linux which keeps you from using your external drive you paid real money for with Linux.

Thank You,