Michael Mol writes: > My point is that the numbers aren't what mattered here. My point is > that SAMSUNG sold me a shoddy product, replaced it with another > instance of the the same shoddy product, wouldn't replace it again, > and never addressed a detailed technical report of a systemic problem > in the same. Bad tech, bad customer service, and it looked like this > was a more common scenario than among other manufacturers. All of it > boiled down to a nasty case of being a bad candidate for spending time > and money.
Samsung, uh? Here's my story of today. My fried just bought two external USB drives. I wanted to know which brand the HD is, so I checked with hdparm -I, and googled for SAMSUNG HD204UI. I found a story about a bug which makes the drive sometimes forget to write a block when it is attached to a SATA adapter in AHCI mode and when the ATA command "IDENTIFY DEVICE" is sent (like in hdparm -I or when using the smartmontools). There is a firmware patch for this, this is good. But on the annoying side: - You need to make a DOS boot floppy and copy the patch there. I don't know how exactly to do this, and I read about people using Linux who needed over an hour for this or even failed. Can't they just let me download an image I can boot from? - It doesn't work over USB, so I would have to install the drive in a PC. - The new firmware has exactly the same revision number. How stupid is this?? I cannot even find out whether the drives have the problem or not. Except by trying to reproduce the problem. Here's a link to the but I described, but It's German only. http://www.heise.de/ct/meldung/Firmware-Patch-fuer-Samsung-Festplatte-EcoGreen-F4-HD204UI-Update-1150154.html I also read some angry comments about Samsung there. Question is, are other manufacturers better? And wasn't Samsung Electronics bought by Seagate anyway? Any idea whether an external USB drive case might count as a SATA controller in AHCI mode? I tried to trigger the bug, but that did not happen, so I guess it's fine, at least when being in the USB case. Another problem is that data access frequently stalls on her PC, like when transferring data or doing a mke2fs. After a while, this message appears in syslog, and the process continues for a while, until it happens again: usb 1-4: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7 Same problem with a GRML boot cd and on another USB port. Happens with both drives. But it is fine on my PC. Wonko
