Did I get burn't on the weekend (Samsung)

[LiamC]

A friend decided they wanted a new computer during the week. So, specced it out and grabbed the bits. Was very explicit about getting a Samsung HDD (among others)—120GB PATA 8MB, because I couldn't find a SATA.

Anyway, could not get this sucker to install XP. It would do the intial install and then refuse to boot from HDD. As the motherboard (Gigabyte K8NF-9, nForce 4) was a new quantity to me, I went searching and found a few people having similar issues with this board.

To cut a long story short, the drive passes all it's diagnostics, is recognised by the BIOS, can be formatted etc. The kicker is, the drives sequential transfer rate is 3MB/s. That's right, 3!

How do I know I haven't goofed? I don't. What I've tried is:

Maxtor SATA gives 58MB/s on same system
WD 800JB PATA gives 55MB/s on same sytem

Maxtor and WD return proper transfer rates on SiS 648 based sytem. Samsung gives 3.2MB/s. All checks as per HDTach

When I tried to Ghost an image from the Maxtor, the 1.2GB image was going to take 7.5 hours, it was giving a transfer rate of 2MB/s

Have I missed anything? Now to find out Samsung's Aussie RMA procedure.

The first question I got from friend was--"why did you want a Samsung drive?"

 

[Handruin]

Have you tried changing the DMA mode to something else on the samsung? This does seem bizzarre.

 

[LiamC]

No. I did read somewhere in my travels that there do seem to be some issues with ATA-6 (?? UDMA-133) and some revisions of NVIDIA chipsets

I'll give that a try.

Thanks Doug.

 

[Tannin]

RMA the drive. As a DOA unit, your retailer will exchange it. If he doesn't, exchange your retailer.

 

[time]

What Tannin said.

nForce 4 ATA is very, very common, so incompatibility is unlikely. However, it is worth checking that the drive's transfer settings are as they are supposed to be (I've seen a new Samsung drive where this was not the case).

Samsung has finally extracted the digit and updated their drive tool (HUTIL) to something usable. It's well worth downloading.