Well I had a similar samsung drive (smaller) die on me when it was about 16
months old. Kind of soured me for buying another Samsung drive. In the
past, I've purchased IBM/Hitachi and WD/Western Digital exclusively. And
I've never had a drive go bad before it was obsolete due to being too small
to bother moving into the next system I build. Until the Samsung, that is.
Bought it based on expert reviews which compared it favorably to seagate and
western digital. Won't make that mistake again.
Still, if I was to consider purchasing a samsung again, 1TB for 60 bucks
seems like a good deal. I'd be happier if it was 7200RPM though. I'm glad
you mentioned warranty. I've still got my dead samsung. Didn't think about
sending it back to the manufacturer. Just bought a WD drive to replace it.
As for SATA, you will need a floppy disk drive to set it up, if it is going
to be your primary boot drive. This is because the OS setup program can't
see the drive before drivers are loaded. There are some work-arounds
though. Like you can format a USB memory stick as a floppy drive and use
that instead. -Dave
I looked around a little, and didn't come up with too much problem
issues. Mostly dated around 2006 stuff. There's a Samsung setup
disk, semi-complicated, in case of some MBs won't handle factory setup
defaults. Couple of weird things for software data thruput (ATA66,
100, and up to SATA-II, or so-called SATA 300 during "its" time), even
a setting for how noisy it's going to be. Review from Tom's Hardware
-- three variants of the model, mine's green, hence 5400, the other
being 7200, one stipulated for RAID. These outrageous prices
evidently aren't so new either, also kicking around back then near $80
on some good sales. Between the Samsung software and a suitable
controller (probably the latest SATA chipsets on a new GigaByteMB),
I'll work it for the backside, using a front beater, a rugged 5-yr
warr. SATA 250G Seagate for the active drive, Samsung going
predominately storage, with another two same-grade Seagates coming out
for some sort of portable data backups. If the Samsung were to crap
at under 2 years, I'm not going to like like it either (ton of MM to
re-copy that are on optical, but I would go after Samsung to replace
it)...I'd as soon rather had an Hitachi, too, but for $48 it's too
easy a vortex not to get sucked into a 1T sale. Would have been no
questions about going the extra buck for a Seagate if it weren't
firmware issues, many who have experienced stalled-out drives, and non-
retail boxes lately changed to a 3-year warranty. Thanks for the
thought in any event Dave.
