Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB problems with Mac Pro

Hi petvas,

I assume you have reformated the drives and are using HFS+ as file system and GUID as partition scheme, right ?
If not there can be the culprit, since most HDs come preformated to be used with PCs and not Macs.

Stefan

Hi petvas,

yeah, that's odd behaviour.
Although there were some threads round here dealing with difficulties with external 1TB drives, I never have heard of problems with internal ones.

Not a solution, but maybe worth trying:
What happens when only one of the 1TB drives is installed ?
Do you have the possibility to put the 1TB drives into an external Firewire/USB enclosure to ensure that not the drives themselves are faulty ?
Is it possible to remove the Barracuda to see if the 1TB drives work then ?

Stefan

You might. Not a lot of people buying 1TB.

AMUG tends to review drives along with controllers. I know they looked at the Hitachi as the first 1TB drive.

Some people - not a lot - have said they looked at WD and Samsung (Aug '06 review said they were nearly a dead heat on performance and noise).

And usually Google itself scans and indexes forum threads, or search for Samsung Spinpoint. That is the only way. If someone has 'em but doesn't post, impossible to know. OWC doesn't sell them, and Newegg isn't going to release their list of who put one in a Mac Pro!

You saved me a big headache. I was just going to order 3 of these for my new mac pro. I think I'll stick with the Hitatchi. Thank you!

A lot of PC users are having problems with the 1TB (and possibly 750GB) Spinpoint F1 drives. Check out the user reviews on newegg.com. Seems like a 20% or 30% failure rate.

Western Digital Caviar RE2 seems to be a reliable drive, and almost as fast.

Hmmm, I wish I'd checked for things like this before buying my drives...

I've used 250-500GB Spinpoints for years now and they've been great. Following on from getting a new Mac Pro at the start of the month, I installed the most I could afford - 4x 750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1 drives. They're arranged as two volumes of mirrored RAID array, i.e. the 3TB storage is presented as two 750GB volumes. Didn't even think about checking reviews, based on my previous Spinpoint drives being really good.

Troubles begin. Three times following a 'cold' boot, the machine simply doesn't "see" the drive in bay 2. Aside from this, I've had numerous mysterious rebuilds of both RAID arrays despite clean shutdowns and startups, all SMART status reports saying 'verified', etc. etc.; I posted about the RAID issue on the forums a while ago but there was no satisfactory conclusion.

Given that I'd only seen bay 2 fail, I arranged for that one drive to be returned to the vendor earlier today, following a system restart where once again the drive in that bay wasn't recognised. I rebooted, all four drives reappeared, RAID arrays started to rebuild and I filled in the RMA form to return a presumably defective single drive in bay 2 (I rebooted so that MacOS would 'see' the drive and report the serial number in System Profiler, since the RMA form required it). About half an hour later, the machine froze (mouse movement/caps lock light working, nothing else responding). After a few minutes it sprung back to life, but the boot volume's RAID array rebuild had failed. This time, the OS had lost connection to the drive in bay 3. Reboots didn't fix it; I had to power cycle the machine. Now it's back up and rebuilding the RAID arrays. Sure enough, all SMART status reports say things are fine.

In short, exactly the problems reported by the original poster. My guess is that the RAID array rebuilds were due to errors detected from the drives, given that the NewEgg reviews often mention data corrupted by the drive during transfer. I value reliability over speed. Should've gone for a different model 😟

The thing is, the faults are intermittent and hard to detect. Unless there is an easily replicable fault, I can only return them to the shop, have the shop test them, then tell me they're not faulty after all, ship the lot back to me and charge me loads for the shipping charges. Gah. And of course, the drives will just keep on failing in the host Mac.

Just have to give them a ring and cross my fingers I guess! 🙂

Yes, lots of issues apparently.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822152102

I still think it is good policy to stay away from OEM and go with retail.

The vendor for the Samsung drives was eBuyer in the UK. I spoke to them about the troublesome discs and without hesitation they offered to replace all of them (whether faulty or not) with a different make of drive for only the cost difference of the parts themselves, due to it being within 28 days of purchase. In the end I opted to separately order Western Digital RE2s as replacements so that they could arrive before the old drives went out so I could copy the data across, although this meant I paid for the delivery charge on that new order. The Samsungs are being collected and shipped back at eBuyer's cost though. Very good service in all.

Sounds like a good source for others in UK that needs a place to buy disk drives.

The ones on Newegg were OEMs, and the reviews on Barefeats and Xlr8yourmac were probably retail.

One reason for installing Windows, to be able to use vendor diagnostics and update firmware on their drives some times.

I took two of these drives to the Samsung service center this morning (fortunately, I live in south Korea). I bought them about three weeks ago, the same time I got my Mac Pro and installed them in bays 2 and 3. Bay 1 has Apple's stock WD 320GB drive. Disk Utility recognized and formatted both drives, though the second one listed SMART status as not supported. After a reboot, both drives showed up properly and the second drive correctly reported SMART support. During the first week of use, I can't say I recall anything strange with the drives. After that, things started to get weird. When waking from sleep, one of the two drives might disappear or it might show up but the files wouldn't be accessible. Rebooting would generally remedy the situation, though sometimes one of the drives would fail to appear even after a reboot. After shutting down, waiting a minute, and restarting, both drives would reappear. Scanning with Disk Utility revealed no errors on either drive and all the data was intact. Ran TechTools Deluxe on them, as well. About half the time, it shows no errors. Other times, it hangs on one of the drive checks. Also ran the Apple extended hardware check, which reported no errors. When I took the drives to the service center today, the technician said both drives report as being fine but they offered to swap them for two new ones, which I'll get tomorrow. Hoping this will remedy the situation.

I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of my Mac Pro (2.8Ghz 8 core, Early 2008). I read very good reviews about the Samsung 1TB Spinpoint drives (HD103UJ). In particular, barefeats and tomshardware observed very good performance. I want to add two internal 1TB hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration (for video editing use). However, after reading this thread, I'm somewhat discouraged from ordering these drives. Granted, it's the nature of forums that folks who don't have trouble are less likely to post information than folks who are having trouble. Has anyone had any good, trouble-free use for these drives? Or is it troublesome enough to not be worth considering anymore? For those who've had trouble, what drives did you wind up buying?

Thanks.