[Smartmontools-support]FYI: Strange behavior of Samsung disk

[Georg A. <ac...@in...>]

Hi,
just a small note about Samsung and reliability...

We recently bought a brandnew Samsung SV1604N (160GB). After two days, a lot
of "uncorrectable" and "Addr mark not found" IDE-errors occured in the
syslog, a kernel compilation died in I/O-errors. An offline test with
"smartctl -t long" produced a steadily increasing number of "Current pending
sectors (197)" (about 160 RAW), the error log (max. 20 entries) showed a lot
of bad sectors scrolling through, most of them widely distributed, only a
few in clusters. The system was almost unuseable, but no SMART attribute
failed (ok, #197 was normalized at 40, start at 255, threshold at 10).

To get a diagnostic code for an easy RMA, we started the Samsung hutil.exe.
The short test proposed that the long test should be started (very
suspicious ;-). The long test found no problems whatsoever (drive fully
functional). A reboot under Linux showed that hutil had obviously fixed the
pending sectors _and_ erased the error log. There's NO trace of the problem at
all in the smartctl output, only #5 (Reallocated sector count) is now 41
(raw value). All other values (especially pending sectors, read error rate)
have been reset, even the normalized WORST values!

Now, what should I think of that strange behavior? It seems not very
trustworthy, especially compared to Maxtor...

-- 
         Georg Acher, ac...@in...
         http://wwwbode.in.tum.de/~acher
         "Oh no, not again !" The bowl of petunias