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Bad Sectors on New Samsung HD400LD

1663 Views 6 Replies 4 Participants Last post by  JamieP, 
M
I recently purchased a Samsung HD400LD from Newegg and because it was an open box item I decided to test it with HUTIL downloaded from Samsung's website. It failed the test miserably with hundreds of bad sectors. I attempted to Low Level format the drive because I read somewhere that this may get rid of the bad sectors but it did not work so I RMA'd the drive.
Today I received a replacement and ran a full test on it as well. HUTIL found three bad sectors on this drive so right now I am attempting a low level format hoping that it might work due to the fact that there are only three instead of several hundred. This Particular model of Hard Drive is highly recommended by members of this forum so I'm wondering if anybody else who might have purchased one tested it and if so did you find any bad sectors?
Are a few bad sectors normal on a Drive this size and should I not be worried about it?
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C
I'm surprised the bad sectors were visible. I though modern drives automatically remapped them during use?
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HomeUser
ciper said:
I'm surprised the bad sectors were visible. I though modern drives automatically remapped them during use?
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If bad sectors are visible then the spare table has been used up.

I suggest you replace the IDE cable Ultra ATA-133 drives REQUIRES the new fine wire EIDE cable or the type of cable I use ATA133/100/66 IDE Round Cable

This is an example of why I run SpinRite at level 5 to stress and test all new drives.
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M
HomeUser said:
I suggest you replace the IDE cable Ultra ATA-133 drives REQUIRES the new fine wire EIDE cable or the type of cable I use ATA133/100/66 IDE Round Cable
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Are you saying that if I am using the wrong type of IDE cable then HUTIL might be showing bad sectors where in fact there are none? The ribbon cable I was using was one of the older grey ones, I just replaced it with a newer yellow one and am running the tests again. What about the short IDE cables that come in Tivos?
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Murdock said:
Are you saying that if I am using the wrong type of IDE cable then HUTIL might be showing bad sectors where in fact there are none? The ribbon cable I was using was one of the older grey ones, I just replaced it with a newer yellow one and am running the tests again. What about the short IDE cables that come in Tivos?
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Definitely, using the 40 wire cable with a PC that has a controller that supports the higher transfer speeds Ultra 100, 133 or 166 data corruption will occur. The diagnostics will see the data written is not the same as data read and the sector(s) will be labeled as bad.

The old cable should work fine if you limit the drive to UDMA33 to match the controller in the TiVo.

Set Max UDMA Mode

This screen shows how to use SET MAX UDMA MODE. If the transmission mode of Mainboard is UDMA33 and the drive's mode is UDMA 100, then recommended to adjust drive's mode to UDMA 33 by this function. This will not perform write operation but recommended to back up the data in preparation for the worst case.
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Hutil product.samsung.com
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M
I have been using an older PC to run tests on the drive, the motherboard supports UDMA 33/66 only. I will try setting the UDMA on the drive to 33 and run the tests again, maybe that will resolve the problem. Thanks for the tip.
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HomeUser said:
Definitely, using the 40 wire cable with a PC that has a controller that supports the higher transfer speeds Ultra 100, 133 or 166 data corruption will occur. The diagnostics will see the data written is not the same as data read and the sector(s) will be labeled as bad.
Click to expand...
The drivers are supposed to detect the cable type and "do the right thing" and back down to UDMA33 with a 40 conductor cable. It has always worked for me.

See detection here.
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