Samsung F3 drive woes continues

In the previous story I mentioned how my girlfriend’s brother’s Samsung F3 drive gave a lot of trouble. I wonder if he will ever go and claim warranty. He is waiting for someone else to do it for him. I just hope the warranty period is more than 1 year, because otherwise he will have to get a new drive.

Now, that was one isolated problem. I was having trouble with my F1 drive which I use as my data drive. (F4 is for backup only.) The troubles were only speed issues. When I copies files and sometimes did few things at the same time using the F1 drive, the PC would become very slow and stall at times. It is not a newly developed problem. That is how drives work. They are so slow because they are slow to access files.

So I was thinking about adding another drive and build a RAID-0 array. I know, RAID-0 is not good for data, but since I backup my data, I didn’t see a problem with that. But the issue was finding an identical drive. Remember this is anyway slow for today’s standards. Newer 7200RPM driver were faster despite having the same rotational speed. It was mostly due to the drive density, which related to how much data could be read in one go. Newer drives were at 500MB or even 667MB (as for my 2TB drive) per platter. Anyways, the cheapest F1 drives I could find online were very expensive, compared to the newer and faster drives everyone was buying these days, specifically the  Samsung F3 drive.

One messy Samsung F3 1TB drive

My girlfriend’s brother is once again having problems with his PC. Previously it was the integrated NIC getting burned and now it is his data drive failing.

I cannot explain what really happened. At first, he couldn’t write to his partitions. It would make the PC freeze up. However, he was able to read the files. When I plugged it in dad’s PC, I couldn’t see the first partition. I could see the second partition, but couldn’t write data nor read some files.

I gave Spinrite a shot. It found errors, some were not correctable; some were. But after running it for hours and hour, and seeing the estimated running time as 10000 hours, I gave up.

One more thing. The partition table seemed to have gotten screwed up. There was a 0 sized partition at the beginning and a 0 sized partition at the end. I tried removing these from Acronis Disk Director but it didn’t find those partitions. But the weirdest thing comes now. It somehow screwed up Windows in dad’s PC. Upon booting, it would always detect an error and automatically go into recovery mode. There was no way to boot normally. When I told the recovery process to go ahead and do its thing, it would stall there.