Trying to decide on new drive

Ohaya · Mar 21, 2004

Hi,

As I posted previously, my new 160GB Samsung drive just died. Death was
somewhat sudden, but was preceded by some strange behavior under HDTach,
where read speed would drop to almost 0 near the end of the drive (e.g.,
119MB, etc.).

Anyway, the drive now constantly makes a ticking sound, and BIOS no longer
detects it (tried in 2 different machines), so I'm assuming it's dead, dead,
dead.

I'd seen a couple posts from others about Samsung drives dying, but I
figured that I'd take a chance and got this because:

- It was very quiet
- It was cheap
- It had ATA133 interface and 8MB cache
- Obviously, lots of space!

Now, I'm trying decide what to do.

I'm 100% sure that the place that I bought this from (local store) will take
it back for exchange. I'm like 99% sure that they'd let me just plain
return it. But as I mentioned above, there were a few reasons why I bought
this particular drive, and those reasons haven't gone away.

So, first of all, I guess I'm looking for opinions re. trying another of the
same drive. Is there any hope for a Samsung working reliably (this is an
SP1604N)?

If the answer to that question is "forget it", then I'm thinking a Seagate
drive.

I've seen a 80GB "Barracuda ATA IV", but I've also seen some "7200.7" drives
at various local places.

Based on the dates of some reviews that I've found, it appears that the ATA
IV drives are older, and the 7200.7 drives are newer.

Is that correct?

What are your all thoughts on either of the above drives, in an 80-120GB
variety?

Thanks, and looking forward to your feedback.

Jim

Rod Speed · Mar 21, 2004

As I posted previously, my new 160GB Samsung drive just
died. Death was somewhat sudden, but was preceded by
some strange behavior under HDTach, where read speed would
drop to almost 0 near the end of the drive (e.g., 119MB, etc.).

Thats not surprising, its likely retrying.

Anyway, the drive now constantly makes a ticking sound,
and BIOS no longer detects it (tried in 2 different machines),
so I'm assuming it's dead, dead, dead.
Yep.

I'd seen a couple posts from others about Samsung drives dying,

There will always be a few of any manufacturer's drives that fail.

but I figured that I'd take a chance and got this because:

- It was very quiet
- It was cheap
- It had ATA133 interface and 8MB cache
- Obviously, lots of space!

Now, I'm trying decide what to do.

I'd get it replaced under the 3 year warranty and check that
you arent killing it with inadequate cooling or a bad power supply.

I'm 100% sure that the place that I bought this from (local store) will
take it back for exchange. I'm like 99% sure that they'd let me just
plain return it. But as I mentioned above, there were a few reasons
why I bought this particular drive, and those reasons haven't gone away.

So, first of all, I guess I'm looking for opinions re.
trying another of the same drive. Is there any hope
for a Samsung working reliably (this is an SP1604N)?

Yep, mine are working fine.

If the answer to that question is "forget it",
then I'm thinking a Seagate drive.

I've seen a 80GB "Barracuda ATA IV", but I've also
seen some "7200.7" drives at various local places.

Based on the dates of some reviews that I've found, it appears
that the ATA IV drives are older, and the 7200.7 drives are newer.

Is that correct?
Yep.

What are your all thoughts on either of the
above drives, in an 80-120GB variety?

I'd get another Samsung and check that you arent
killing it with inadequate cooling or a bad power supply.

Ohaya · Mar 21, 2004

Rod Speed said:
Thats not surprising, its likely retrying.

There will always be a few of any manufacturer's drives that fail.

I'd get it replaced under the 3 year warranty and check that
you arent killing it with inadequate cooling or a bad power supply.

Yep, mine are working fine.

I'd get another Samsung and check that you arent
killing it with inadequate cooling or a bad power supply.

Rod,

Thanks for your responses above. Since posting, I've been searching, and I
think I will go try another one tomorrow. I am glad to hear that your
Samsung drives are working ok. Do you mind if I ask how many you're
running, and which models? The one that I have that died is an SP1614N.

Also, re. cooling, I only had the drive for about a week and a half, and was
configuring it, and had not yet put it into the case. I had it connected to
the system, but situated outside the case the whole time, in a test mount
that I use, i.e., the drive was never inside the case.

Also, I'd been using Diskcheckup to monitor the SMART temperature, and as
far as I could tell, the temperature reported was at maximum ~39C.

You had mentioned "power". What kind of power problems were you alluding
to?

Thanks again. Your comments were very helpful.

Jim

Ohaya · Mar 21, 2004

Thanks for your responses above. Since posting, I've been searching, and
I

think I will go try another one tomorrow. I am glad to hear that your
Samsung drives are working ok. Do you mind if I ask how many you're
running, and which models? The one that I have that died is an SP1614N.

Also, how long have you had them, and do they run 24x7?

FYI, just to be safe, since I've been configuring and testing the drive,
I've been shutting the system down when I was not working on the system...

Jim

Rod Speed · Mar 21, 2004

Ohaya said:
Thanks for your responses above. Since posting, I've been searching,
and I think I will go try another one tomorrow. I am glad to hear that your
Samsung drives are working ok. Do you mind if I ask how many you're
running, and which models? The one that I have that died is an SP1614N.

Also, re. cooling, I only had the drive for about a week and a half,
and was configuring it, and had not yet put it into the case. I had it
connected to the system, but situated outside the case the whole
time, in a test mount that I use, i.e., the drive was never inside the case.

In that case you may have killed it by moving it around with the drive spinning.

Also, I'd been using Diskcheckup to monitor the SMART temperature, and
as far as I could tell, the temperature reported was at maximum ~39C.
OK.

You had mentioned "power". What kind
of power problems were you alluding to?

Its possible to have a bad power supply that kills a drive by
delivering voltages outside the specs, particulary during surges etc.

Thanks again. Your comments were very helpful.

No problem, thats what these technical groups are for.

Rod Speed · Mar 21, 2004

Same series, mostly 120GBs tho.

Also, how long have you had them,

The oldest over 6 months.

and do they run 24x7?
Mostly.

FYI, just to be safe, since I've been configuring and
testing the drive, I've been shutting the system down
when I was not working on the system...

Yeah, I normally do that with a new system, at least for the first
week or so, turn it off overnight, just in case it does go bang.

Ohaya · Mar 21, 2004

Rod Speed said:
case.

In that case you may have killed it by moving it around with the drive spinning.

Its possible to have a bad power supply that kills a drive by
delivering voltages outside the specs, particulary during surges etc.

No problem, thats what these technical groups are for.

Rod,

Thanks for all of your help (again

).

I don't think the drive was ever moved while powered up. The "mount" that I
mentioned was a special thing that I put together so that I could safely
test drives outside of the case. As I mentioned, the drive started behaving
strangely, especially with HDTach yesterday afternoon. I starting hearing
occasional "clicking" sounds when it was completely idle. At first, I
couldn't figure out where the clicks were coming from.

Then, we running HDTach, I'd see multiple speed drop offs at the > 100GB
addresses, where read speed on the graph would drop to almost 0.

A bit later, after the machine was off awhile and powering it, BIOS wouldn't
detect the drive anymore, and it would start clicking continuously.

Thank goodness that as part of this whole sorry exercise, I have my data,
etc. on my original drive (which is safely tucked away) and also a network
backup on laptop.

FYI, it turns out that Best Buy has a rebate offer on the 80GB Seagate (I
believe one of the 7200.7 drives), so bottom line price was like $60 AR, so
I decided to "chicken out" on getting an exact replacement for the Samsung
SP1614N.

I lose on space and the interface speed (the SP1614N is ATA133 vs. ATA100 on
the Seagate), and have less drive space (160GB vs. 80GB), but the main
reason that I was looking for a replacement drive was because the
high-pitched whine from my present drive was driving me crazy, so anything
over the 30GB that I have now, if it's quiet, is a bonus. Plus, since the
Seagate is less than 127GB, I won't run into the problem with Win2K not
being able to see the entire drive.

Anyway, again, thank you for your help and responses. Hopefully, the
Seagate will give me less grief than the Samsung did

!!

Jim

S.Heenan · Mar 22, 2004

Ohaya said:
FYI, it turns out that Best Buy has a rebate offer on the 80GB
Seagate (I believe one of the 7200.7 drives), so bottom line price
was like $60 AR, so I decided to "chicken out" on getting an exact
replacement for the Samsung SP1614N.

I lose on space and the interface speed (the SP1614N is ATA133 vs.
ATA100 on the Seagate), and have less drive space (160GB vs. 80GB),
but the main reason that I was looking for a replacement drive was
because the high-pitched whine from my present drive was driving me
crazy, so anything over the 30GB that I have now, if it's quiet, is a
bonus. Plus, since the Seagate is less than 127GB, I won't run into
the problem with Win2K not being able to see the entire drive.

I've used or installed several dozen Seagate Barracuda IV/V 7200RPM IDE hard
drives and a few of the 7200.7 series. To the best of my knowledge, not a
failure to date. They run cool and quiet. Benchmarks are not quite as good
as others the 7200RPM 2MB class. In real world use, this is not a concern.

Ohaya · Mar 22, 2004

S.Heenan said:
I've used or installed several dozen Seagate Barracuda IV/V 7200RPM IDE hard
drives and a few of the 7200.7 series. To the best of my knowledge, not a
failure to date. They run cool and quiet. Benchmarks are not quite as good
as others the 7200RPM 2MB class. In real world use, this is not a concern.

Hi,

So far, so good

.

I'm imaged my OS onto a 1st partition, and am copying my files over to the
drive now.

Re. "quiet", my subjective opinion so far is that it is very quiet. I would
say as quiet as the Samsung that died (well, before it died

!).

Re. "run cool", I was wondering about this. I'm using a utility called
"DiskCheckUp" that reads the SMART info, and it is showing about 41C while
I'm doing the (multiple) copies over the network. Is this normal and ok for
this drive?

41C seems a little "warm". BTW, drive is still not in the PC case yet,
essentially fully exposed to room temperature with the mount that I have it
in.

Jim

Rod Speed · Mar 22, 2004

Ohaya said:
Hi,

So far, so good .

I'm imaged my OS onto a 1st partition, and am copying my files over to the
drive now.

Re. "quiet", my subjective opinion so far is that it is very quiet. I would
say as quiet as the Samsung that died (well, before it died !).

Re. "run cool", I was wondering about this. I'm using a utility called
"DiskCheckUp" that reads the SMART info, and it is showing about 41C while
I'm doing the (multiple) copies over the network. Is this normal and ok for
this drive?

41C seems a little "warm".

Yeah, it is a little.

BTW, drive is still not in the PC case yet, essentially fully exposed
to room temperature with the mount that I have it in.

How much metal is in thermal contact with the drives ?

The Barras are designed to get rid of a lot of heat by
conduction to the metal drive bay stack and can get
stinking hot if used much loose on the tabletop for
example, particularly the ones with the rubber mats.

S.Heenan · Mar 22, 2004

Ohaya said:
Hi,

So far, so good .

I'm imaged my OS onto a 1st partition, and am copying my files over
to the drive now.

Re. "quiet", my subjective opinion so far is that it is very quiet.
I would say as quiet as the Samsung that died (well, before it died
!).

Re. "run cool", I was wondering about this. I'm using a utility
called "DiskCheckUp" that reads the SMART info, and it is showing
about 41C while I'm doing the (multiple) copies over the network. Is
this normal and ok for this drive?

41C seems a little "warm". BTW, drive is still not in the PC case
yet, essentially fully exposed to room temperature with the mount
that I have it in.

Good to hear. While 41°C isn't as cool as I've seen a Seagate, it probably
has to do with being heavily used and not being in the case. If your case
allows, place a filtered intake fan infront of the hard drive bay, blowing
inward. It does not need to move much air.That way the hard drive
temperature will be within a degree or two of room temperature.

Ohaya · Mar 22, 2004

S.Heenan said:
Good to hear. While 41°C isn't as cool as I've seen a Seagate, it probably
has to do with being heavily used and not being in the case. If your case
allows, place a filtered intake fan infront of the hard drive bay, blowing
inward. It does not need to move much air.That way the hard drive
temperature will be within a degree or two of room temperature.

Hi,

Somewhat reluctantly, I've gone and purchase one of Antec's "drive cooling
systems", and I'll give it a try when I'm home this afternoon. The
reluctance was because one of the main reasons that I went out for a new
drive was because the old 30GB drive I had makes this high frequency whine
that lately has been irritating me a lot, and I've been striving for a
"silent-er" PC. Again, that was the reason for choosing the Samsung drive
before, then the Seagate drive now, so adding ANOTHER TWO fans to my system
was just about the last thing I wanted to do.

But then again, I want the drive to last, so thought that I'd give it a try
(plus having the temperature display up front seems very cool

).

Has anyone here used the Antec gizmo before. Comments?

Jim

John Turco · Mar 23, 2004

Ohaya said:
Hi,

Somewhat reluctantly, I've gone and purchase one of Antec's "drive cooling
systems", and I'll give it a try when I'm home this afternoon. The
reluctance was because one of the main reasons that I went out for a new
drive was because the old 30GB drive I had makes this high frequency whine
that lately has been irritating me a lot, and I've been striving for a
"silent-er" PC. Again, that was the reason for choosing the Samsung drive
before, then the Seagate drive now, so adding ANOTHER TWO fans to my system
was just about the last thing I wanted to do.

But then again, I want the drive to last, so thought that I'd give it a try
(plus having the temperature display up front seems very cool ).

Has anyone here used the Antec gizmo before. Comments?

Jim

Hello, Jim:

You should check the Seagate's temperature, >after< mounting it in the
computer case; as Rod Speed has already indicated (and I now quote),
the Barracuda hard disks "are designed to get rid of a lot of heat by
conduction to the metal drive bay stack."

Thus, you may not even need the "Antec gizmo," at all.

Good luck!

Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>