SAMSUNG HD204UI important firmware patch required

[kfoda]

Just a quick one to be aware of.

For those of you who are going to use newish SAMSUNG HD204UI (2TB F4 EcoGreen 5400rpm) drives in a system, please be aware that you will probably need to patch the firmware on them.

This is due to a bug where if any software uses "IDENTIFY DEVICE" and you are also writing to the drive a bad block is generated.

See http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks and http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386 for more details.

 

[Jbiss]

What are your experiences with these drives in a RAID configuration? I recently purchased an Areca ARC-1880i card and was planning to setup a RAID 5 or RAID 6 with the Samsung HD204UI drives.

I already have one drive and I'm very happy with it. Looking through other forums and reviews, I can't find much information of these drives in RAID configurations.

 

[kurtkurtosis]

I am using the Samsung F204s in a QNAP 459 Pro+ RAID-5 configuration without any problems for the past three months. But this is only software RAID. I am aware of the patch but I have yet to apply it.

 

[kfoda]

What are your experiences with these drives in a RAID configuration? I recently purchased an Areca ARC-1880i card and was planning to setup a RAID 5 or RAID 6 with the Samsung HD204UI drives.

I already have one drive and I'm very happy with it. Looking through other forums and reviews, I can't find much information of these drives in RAID configurations.

I have 10 of these drives in a ZFS RAIDZ2 (equivalent to RAID 6) pool. No problems so far. If you use anything that reads the SMART parameters on the drive, then I would advise flashing to the "fixed" firmware before use.

 

[odditory]

What are your experiences with these drives in a RAID configuration? I recently purchased an Areca ARC-1880i card and was planning to setup a RAID 5 or RAID 6 with the Samsung HD204UI drives.

I already have one drive and I'm very happy with it. Looking through other forums and reviews, I can't find much information of these drives in RAID configurations.

1880i works perfectly with Samsung HD204UI's, but you still want to patch the firmware on the Samsungs even though the write-hole issue is less likely to be triggered in a hardware raid config.

However for my money I'd stick with Hitachi 5K3000 2TB drives if I had the choice between it and a Samsung HD204UI. Granted I have a Hitachi bias because I've had so many of their drives perform flawlessly for so long. Plenty of people report HD204UI's working nicely.

 

[jamesyd]

Please help

I bought one of these drives in November for storing movies and music, I recently ran HD Tune on it and it wont read past 1099gb, The random seek test fails... But when I run the Samsung Estools diagnostic, it doesn't find any problems at all :S. I really do not want to lose all my media, have I got a bad drive???

 

[Patrick]

I bought one of these drives in November for storing movies and music, I recently ran HD Tune on it and it wont read past 1099gb, The random seek test fails... But when I run the Samsung Estools diagnostic, it doesn't find any problems at all :S. I really do not want to lose all my media, have I got a bad drive???

Any other details on the OS/ system/ config? How does check disk work with that drive? Some benchmarks are buggy so I would not say HD Tune is something I would use as a primary diagnostic tool if nothing else seems to be wrong.

 

[jamesyd]

Im using Vista Home Premium (32bit)... Paranoid, don't wanna lose all this data lol, chkdsk doesn't find any bad sectors. I'm just after flashing the drive there now with the update, do you think it'l be ok to use as normal?

 

[Patrick]

I would backup the drive before flashing firmware just in case. I would probably keep the drive for now if HD Tune is the only one showing an issue. Always good to keep backups though.

 

[zicoz]

When I run the F4eg.exe I get the following line:

>>c:\fw\samsung\2TBF4EG\F4EG.exe @ 16:03

Does this mean that my drives are up to date?