Samsung 2TB green drives defective firmware?

rakinishu said:
hey on crystal disk mark my samsung f4 harddrive is not detected. it only sees my ssd. anyone have any ideas why it won't see my hard drive.
Click to expand...

Does the drive show up at all in your system? If not it was probably DOA. And no this is not Samsung specific. At work I have had DOA drives from every single manufacture that I have purchased drives from..
 
drescherjm said:
Does the drive show up at all in your system? If not it was probably DOA. And no this is not Samsung specific. At work I have had DOA drives from every single manufacture that I have purchased drives from..
Click to expand...

You need to go into the tools menu and disable the firmware override. Because of the problems this drive had it doesn't query the smart info by default.
 
DNR said:
Does anyone have these drives hooked to a AOC-SAT2-MV8 controller? I'm about to put a couple of these drives, after flashing, into a an existing WHS box and was wondering if there are any known issues.
Click to expand...
I had 5 hooked up to this controller. No worries.
Switched to Hitachi 5K3000s for increased capacity. Works fine too :)
 
Thanks for the info...looks like I'll have something to do this weekend.
 
ok, have 30+ years experience, but plead some ignorance here.
bought two 2tb drives, and now thrown into world of ALIGNMENT !

ok, downloaded the patch for samsung, did get it installed (removed from usb box, plugged into HP motherboard).
THEN got paragon's ALIGNMENT tool, and am doing that now.

I have about 1tb data on both.

QUESTION
CAN I now do surface scans, etc, without fear (partial fear) of destroying data?

QUESTION
WHICH is best program to use? does samsung have one for testing, or is HDtune better?

QUESTION
WHAT am I looking for, in results? REASON is that BEFORE the patch, before I knew about it and this thread, I had run HD tune, when I first got drives. Now, concern is whether that damaged them (patch issue, etc)

AGAIN, any simple responses to above is appreciated, I've waded through the thread, and am confused, especially when I see posts of multi-ppage error reports, track reports, etc

thanks
Nick
 
So I ran the f4e.exe (or what ever it is called) from dos and it said downloaded successfully. But the version number is still the same. Anything else I need to worry about or am I good to go?
 
munkle said:
So I ran the f4e.exe (or what ever it is called) from dos and it said downloaded successfully. But the version number is still the same. Anything else I need to worry about or am I good to go?
Click to expand...

While your question is valid, it has been answered many times in this thread.

Yes, this is the expected behavior for the patch. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, Samsung should have incremented / altered the firmware number. If you are unsure if you need the patch, run it anyway. It doesn't seem to hurt anything.

EDIT: I just ran F4EG.EXE in DOS against 11 drives. It was kinda neat. I hope they prove to be solid.
 
Last edited:
Quick probably stupid question - so is it still necessary to update the firmware on brand new drives? Looking to buy a bunch for my new raid setup.
 
systemlayers said:
Quick probably stupid question - so is it still necessary to update the firmware on brand new drives? Looking to buy a bunch for my new raid setup.
Click to expand...

Well I got my drive a few days ago and the manufacture date was december 10, 2010. One day after the firmware was released, I did the update on mine just to be safe.
 
I guess I'll be doing the updates on these as well.

I just bought 'ALOT' of them and waiting to get out so I can do a pickup. They already sent me my confirmation, so I'm hoping they aren't just aren't lying. I really didn't think they'll have the quantity I asked for in the store, but I guess so.

The price with tax isn't that much higher then when I order with shipping. It comes out to an extra few bucks. But if I can do a local pickup, I would rather do that instead.

What's funny is, I'm going to fill out another SAS expander just on these now.
 
Wiznaz said:
I managed to get into the SFLASH menu in DOS from the CD-Rom but I don't see any firmware flashing options. Any suggestions? Is there a command I have to enter? The harddrive is port 2.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/Wiznaz/611e96e2.jpg
Click to expand...

I think you have to change your working directory to where the app is, so cd x:\, then run the executable. A previous poster had the same issue. Hope that helps.
 
It finally worked!

After several attempts of trying this, I was able to re-flash successfully. I made sure:

-All USB flash drives were disconnected
-No other HDDs were connected except the Samsung
-The Samsung drive was plugged into 'SATA1' on the mobo
-The SATA configuration was set to 'Compatible' in the BIOS

This time the FREEDOS boot menu was actually a little different for me while getting to command prompt than what I was given during the unsuccessful attempts. I knew something was up when I didn't get the usual 'X:\FREEDOS' in command prompt either; all that was there was a 'X:\'. I just typed 'F4EG' and hit Enter and watched it successfully do it's thing. Here is a screen shot:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/Wiznaz/a3b64981.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/Wiznaz/20f9063f.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/Wiznaz/884bbc87.jpg

Thanks,
Mike
 
From another forum:

"Have Samsung truly fixed SMART or have they implemented some kludge to work around the problem?

I have a pair of these HD204UI disks, with the 'fixed' firmware, manufacture date March 2011. Although I am not seeing data corruption (and I have done a lot of copying them full and md5 checksumming before even considering using them) they both keep incrementing their ATA error count in the SMART log with an "abort" error. I can see it in dmesg too. It appears they do this when SMART is queried whilst they are in low-power mode, at which point the SATA controller performs a reset and they continue working. If I am streaming video files from them there will be a delay whilst this happens. All of actual the SMART counters (error rates, reallocated sectors etc.) are healthy.

If I send hdparm commands after bootup (Ubuntu 10.04 seems to be somewhat broken at setting /etc/hdparm.conf itself) the ATA errors cease. If I reboot and forget to set it, they increase again, either gradually throughout the day (background SMART polling?) or every time I manually read the SMART data.

Nothing special about the disk controller, nVidia MCP51 with SWNCQ and RAID disabled. And works perfectly with my various Hitachi and WD disks."

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=538921#p538921
 
dmesg
Quote:
[ 8719.657212] ata5.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6
[ 8719.657227] ata5.00: failed command: SMART
[ 8719.657242] ata5.00: cmd b0/d1:01:01:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 tag 0 pio 512 in
[ 8719.657244] res 51/84:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[ 8719.657251] ata5.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 8719.657256] ata5.00: error: { ICRC ABRT }
[ 8719.657270] ata5: hard resetting link
[ 8719.657274] ata5: nv: skipping hardreset on occupied port
[ 8720.140095] ata5: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 8720.160235] ata5.00: failed to IDENTIFY (INIT_DEV_PARAMS failed, err_mask=0x80)
[ 8720.160245] ata5.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
[ 8725.140053] ata5: hard resetting link
[ 8725.140062] ata5: nv: skipping hardreset on occupied port
[ 8725.632574] ata5: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 8725.670386] ata5.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 8725.670444] ata5: EH complete


SMART log:
Quote:
Error 28 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 109 hours (4 days + 13 hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle.

After command completion occurred, registers were:
ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
84 51 00 00 4f c2 00 Error: ABRT

Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- --------------------
b0 d0 01 00 4f c2 00 0a 00:00:08.749 SMART READ DATA
b0 d0 01 00 4f c2 00 0a 00:00:08.749 SMART READ DATA
b0 da 00 00 4f c2 00 0a 00:00:08.749 SMART RETURN STATUS
b0 da 00 00 4f c2 00 0a 00:00:08.749 SMART RETURN STATUS
ec 00 01 00 00 00 00 0a 00:00:08.749 IDENTIFY DEVICE

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=59946&p=538941#p538941
 
I can tell you that none of my 3 Samsung f4s have registered any errors in the months that I have had them.
 
Every 10.0s: zpool status|tail -n 14 Tue Apr 12 00:44:34 2011

scan: scrub in progress since Mon Apr 11 20:22:49 2011
4.91T scanned out of 6.21T at 328M/s, 1h9m to go
88K repaired, 78.94% done
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
tank ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c7t1d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 2
c7t2d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 1 (repairing)
c7t3d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 2 (repairing)
c7t4d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0

I've had the drives for a few weeks, checksum errors started cropping up when I put the drives under heavy load. I haven't ran the patch on any of the drives as I had read that drives with a January manufacture date were already patched. What are the odds of getting three bunk drives?

fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu
 
Last edited:
01 ATTRIBUTE_NAME.................RAW_VALUE
02 Raw_Read_Error_Rate....................0
03 Throughput_Performance.................0
04 Spin_Up_Time.......................10139
05 Start_Stop_Count......................11
06 Reallocated_Sector_Ct..................0
07 Seek_Error_Rate........................0
08 Seek_Time_Performance..................0
09 Power_On_Hours.......................319
10 Spin_Retry_Count.......................0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count................0
12 Power_Cycle_Count.....................12
13 Unknown_Attribute................1654844
14 G-Sense_Error_Rate...................525
15 Power-Off_Retract_Count................0
16 Temperature_Celsius...................28
17 Hardware_ECC_Recovered.................0
18 Reallocated_Event_Count................0
19 Current_Pending_Sector.................0
20 Offline_Uncorrectable..................0
21 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count...................0
22 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate..................0
23 Load_Retry_Count.......................0
24 Load_Cycle_Count......................12


This drive ended up having 3 checksum errors... It's smart attributes are clean except a very low gsense value. Btw, who is the einstein who thought s/\w+/\ /g was a good idea?
 
No. The updated firmware was installed in all new drives starting some time in December. Your drive is fine. If you know any linux you can test it yourself if you read the smartmontools page in the first link and run the "How to reproduce" test from basically any linux livecd/usbstick.

EDIT: Remember the "How to reproduce" test is destructive to any data on the drive so make sure you have the right drive and nothing useful is installed on the F4..
 
Last edited:
drf said:
From another forum:

"Have Samsung truly fixed SMART or have they implemented some kludge to work around the problem?
...
Click to expand...

The original poster on the other forum posted an update:

"I moved the 2 HD204UI disks to an old SII3114 controller I had lying around and the problems seem to have ceased. It would appear that the problem is the MCP51 SATA controller, or some kind of compatibility issue between the HD204UI and MCP51."
 
Bought 5 HD204UIs 3 months ago for a RAID, had one go out on me over the weekend. Looking at the log there was a ton of sector and r/w errors, SMART had a lot of raw read errors. So ran over to Frys to get a replacement and rebuild, it's working ok at the moment. 1 of the other 4 has 15 raw read errors, so I'll have to keep an eye on that, and 1 has 1 multi-zone error, don't know if that's anything to get excited about. 2 have G-sense errors, but those haven't gone up in a few months, so not worried about that.
 
son of a.... i bought 6 HDs, all manufactured in 2/2011. The serials were all close, so it's like the same batch. Except 1 was DOA. Today I got a replacement and it was made in 12/2010. Now I have 1 black sheep drive. I had to flash it to be safe, but I hope performance is about the same as the new batch that it doesn't ruin my array :)
 
dmo580 said:
son of a.... i bought 6 HDs, all manufactured in 2/2011. The serials were all close, so it's like the same batch. Except 1 was DOA. Today I got a replacement and it was made in 12/2010. Now I have 1 black sheep drive. I had to flash it to be safe, but I hope performance is about the same as the new batch that it doesn't ruin my array :)
Click to expand...

Your lucky to get Samsung as replacement. They might be sending Seagates as replacement, soon (see the post above, the one before yours). ;)
 
to all,
i am an experienced computer user, but plead ignorance with this drive issue.
i did get the patch and apply it to my two drives, but that was AFTER I loaded about 1.5 tb of data to each of these.

HOW to test these two drives, to do surface testing, or data integrity testing, etc?

what is a good program to use?

I had originaly tried the HDTune PRIOR to the patch, have not run ANY testing software SINCE installing the patch.

any feedback on this is appreciated.
 
Hey guys, I just got 4 of these drives to put in my new DS411+

the mfr date was 2011.1
Is it safe to say this has the fixed firmware?
Also mine says Rev A...

Pretty dumb of samsung not to just change the firmware version so we actually knew if we had faulty firmware.
 
Last edited:
I'm very late to this discussion - have owned a pair of these drives for several months, and only just recently stumbled upon this bug. I've read through most of the thread but still have some questions about what to do.

I have 2 of these drives installed in my Dell in RAID1 mirror configuration. As I mentioned above, I bought these drives a while ago, well before December 2010. Am I pretty much guaranteed to have data corruption/errors already? I'm running Windows Vista, no special hard drive monitoring software. I didn't do any sector alignment, etc., just dropped them in my computer (as a replacement of a pair of 1TB drives, also in RAID mirror). I'm also just running the RAID using the Intel chipset kludge (not a separate real RAID card). The disks are only being used for user data; the OS and all program files are on a separate drive.

Will the firmware flash procedure work properly with the drives in a RAID mirror? Will it mess up the RAID configuration at all? Will I lose any data I have on the drives by running the firmware update? Is there any way to check whether I have had an data loss/corruption? I haven't had the mirror array complain about any discrepancies or errors where it had to rebuild one of the disks (other than dirty shutdowns brought on by blue screens, though maybe those blue screens were brought on by the data corruption...). Is this kind of error something that would have caused an error inthe RAID array, or would it have affected both drives equally?
 
munkle said:
Well I got my drive a few days ago and the manufacture date was december 10, 2010. One day after the firmware was released, I did the update on mine just to be safe.
Click to expand...

Where do you see this date of Dec 10, 2010 on the drive? Is it on the label on the outside of the drive? Could you post a pic of where you see the manufacture date because I don't have a specific date like that anywhere on my drive.
 
newb said:
I

Will the firmware flash procedure work properly with the drives in a RAID mirror? Will it mess up the RAID configuration at all? Will I lose any data I have on the drives by running the firmware update? Is there any way to check whether I have had an data loss/corruption? I haven't had the mirror array complain about any discrepancies or errors where it had to rebuild one of the disks (other than dirty shutdowns brought on by blue screens, though maybe those blue screens were brought on by the data corruption...). Is this kind of error something that would have caused an error inthe RAID array, or would it have affected both drives equally?
Click to expand...

You can flash the drives with the new firmware without causing any problems with your RAID array. I had 2 of these drives in RAID1 array, and I took each drive out and hooked them up to another computer separately and flashed them on a 2nd computer. I don't think you want to do it on the same computer that the RAID array is on although you could try. Just disconnect all the drives except for the one you are flashing.

The actual flash procedure doesn't alter any of the data on the drive or cause any problems with RAID1.
 
havokator said:
You can flash the drives with the new firmware without causing any problems with your RAID array. I had 2 of these drives in RAID1 array, and I took each drive out and hooked them up to another computer separately and flashed them on a 2nd computer. I don't think you want to do it on the same computer that the RAID array is on although you could try. Just disconnect all the drives except for the one you are flashing.

The actual flash procedure doesn't alter any of the data on the drive or cause any problems with RAID1.
Click to expand...

I understand that part of it. I guess I'm trying to avoid having to pull disks out, etc. Can I do it "in place"? And am I already kind of screwed by the fact that I have had these disks running in my computer for about a year on the old firmware? Or would that RAID have helped?
 
MY HD204UI just died. I tested it with ES Tool and all tests are OK, except surface test. It said it has bad sector, but nonetheless, I cannot acces to my data.

Is there any linux/dos application to use it to try get data from this dying piece of s@&t
 
drescherjm said:
ddrescue to a new drive.



You will have that with every single drive manufacturer trust me. I have sent back RMAs for all manufacturers this year at work and I am also nearing the top end of googles expected 2% to 8% annual failure rate for drives that are less than 5 years. See figure 2 on page 4:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
Click to expand...
I've only ever had a Maxtor die on me personally, but in the workplace the manufacturer definitely didn't matter. Just get a replacement from the OEM and call it a day.
Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive
models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do
not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes
significantly when we normalize failure rates per each
drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by
drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a
breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage
due to the proprietary nature of these data.
Click to expand...
Would be interesting to see.
 
This guide describes the almost-mandatory firmware upgrade process of the Samsung F4 HD204UI drives the easy way - USING USB STICKS.

This is my attempt to help those contemplating over the upgrade. During my research I simply couldn't find a thorough description of the procedure. These hard drives (HD-s from now on) are exceptionally well engineered, so the effort is definitely worth it!

Why should end-users upgrade the firmware? The answer is simple; using them with the old firmware might result in serious data loss later, as described by Samsung. (Certain people believe that drives with manufacturing date later than February 2011 dont have this issue; mine was manufactured in 03/2011 and I still did the upgrade, just to be safe.) Fortunately Samsung released the improved firmware on its website called F4EG (a zipped up exe file):

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386

But the real hurdle is that you have to boot in DOS to perform the update! You could do so using a floppy drive, but not many of us have those lying around anymore, therefore my guide gives pointers on how to perform the upgrade using a USB thumb drive.
Updating the firmware leaves the existing data intact on the drive; also, the drive comes unformatted; best to do the formatting on a Windows 7 computer, or use a modern formatting utility instead of Windows XP-s built-in one. Then, you can use a freeware utility such as SpeedFan or HDDScan or HDTune Pro to check for bad sectors/issues. The executable firmware file works automatically and only selects the correct drive, no user direction required. Also, the Samsung firmware upgrade MIGHT not run if your drive has the latest firmware installed already by the factory.

The updating procedure using external hard drive dock connected through either USB2.0 or eSata to my PC did not work... I had to disassemble my Dell Zino HTPC: remove the Blu-Ray ROM, HD caddy w/ orig. HD) and connect the Samsung HD directly to the motherboard (Before disassembly I booted into the BIOS by hitting F2 on keyboard of my Zino, changed boot order to "USB first". There might be other steps needed for other PC-s.)
I used one of my newer USB drives (my 16GB Kingston DataTraveler), I installed unetbootin on my PC. Then using unetbootin I installed FreeDOS onto the USB stick, downloaded and copied the Samsung firmware (exe file) into the same folder with FreeDOS (that is, into the root directory called "freedos").
Download software mentioned above and follow instructions from these two links:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ (click "Download for Windows" on top of page).

http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/ (fdbasecd.iso is what you'll need to download).

Boot your PC up with the Samsung HD installed; repeatedly hit F12 on keyboard to access boot order.
Navigate to the "USB (name of USB stick here)" line with the arrow keys, hit ENTER
Next screen is the "Unetbooting" screen, select fdos, hit ENTER ("freedos" can't be selected, ironically...)
Select the "Freedos Safe Mode (don't load any drivers)" line from the next screen, hit ENTER
Check the exact DOS name of the firmware file by typing "DIR" after "A:\" first. (This came handy to me, since the firmware file I originally named "F4EG.EXE" was renamed to F4EGEX~1 in DOS!)
If you can't see the F4EG file in the "A:\" directory, switch to the C directory by typing "C:" following the "A:\" and hitting ENTER
Next, type the DOS name of your firmware after "A:\" (or "C:\"...), hit ENTER
There will be a few messages displayed:

"Now updating code"
"Please wait for a while"
"Download completed successfully" (followed by the S/N of the HD in brackets)

Reboot PC to finalize upgrade. You can run the firmware patch repeatedly on new drives if you power off and reboot. The update itself takes less than a minute.
Important: the "Download Completed Successfully" message is pretty much the ONLY confirmation on a successful firmware upgrade! Based on Samsung's own update instructions, the firmware version number does not change at all (Samsung dropped the ball on this big time...).

I know I am late to the game with this write-up,; I hope it still helps some people out there! :)
 
Hey guys, I'm new storage data terms.

What does alignment of the drive do? I just picked up a Samsung F4, updated firmware.

Do I need to align the drive before I use it? I'm on Win 7 64bit.

Thanks in advance.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top