[mythtv-users] A warning about Samsung HDDs

[David Rees]

On 10/30/05, Dewey Smolka <dsmolka at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I just had a Samsung HDD (my MBE's boot disk/recordings volume) come
> to a literal screeching halt less than 30 days after I purchased it.
> The part # is SP2514N (250GB, 7200rpm, 8M, PATA), and I bought it at
> Microcenter -- it's an OEM drive, so it came without any packaging.
> And I do mean it came to a screeching halt -- while I was watching the
> football game, the unit started making some really unnerving sounds
> and froze the system. When I tried to reboot, it wouldn't even get to
> GRUB.

Don't tell me, my Samsun HDD SP1614N (160GB, smartd started reporting
"1 Offline uncorrectable sectors" a month or 2 ago. Found them by
having smartd run long self tests once a week. So far it's only one
sector, but I'm not looking forward to swapping out the drive and
moving everything to a new one.

> I still have no idea what happened, but can rule out a couple things.
> It wasn't a heat issue as I had been regularly monitoring drive temps
> since setting up my new rig. It generally ran at between 35 and 38 C,
> and maxed out about 42 C.

My drive is running around the same temperatures according to smartctl.

> There was no indication from SMART that anything was amiss.

Make sure you configured smartd to run an extended self test once a week:

/dev/hda -a -H -s L/../../7/03 -m root

> I know I can get the Samsung replaced, but it will still take me the
> better part of a day to reinstall everything and redo the menus etc
> how I had them before. This is not what I wanted to do this week.

I'll probably buy a replacement drive (Seagate which I've always had
good luck with) and move my myth install to it and relegate the
Samsung to backup drive duties where if it goes bad it won't be a big
deal unless one of my primary drives dies at the same time.

-Dave