Samsung HD204UI 2tb - slow writes

[Scoob]

Hi all,

I fitted some Samsung 2tb drives a couple of months back replacing the 1tb models.

These new HD204UI 2tb 5,400rpm drives are...well, pretty crap to be honest. Ok, they were cheap, high capacity etc. and the prior 1tb model was great. The BIG issue here is PAINFULLY slow write speeds - and issue that's reported many many times if you google.

My older 1tb Samsung drives (also 5,400rpm) work great, average read circa 80mB/s average write circa 70mB/s - a bit higher if I'm transfering larger media file like I often do.

The new 2tb drives on the other hand can hapily read at 120-130mB/s (fast) but the best I've seen on write is just 32mB/s! This is really really poor!

Now the cables / controller (motherboard) etc. are fine as I can pop one of the 1tb drives on the same channel using the same cable at it gets the expected GOOD write speeds. These new drives though get the same poor write speeds on ALL ports using ANY of my cables.

One thing I did notice, these new drives are supposed to be the new 4k block standard - however they announce themselves to windows as normal 512k blocks, so windows formats them as such. Not sure if this is right or not.

Still, they are formatted the same as the older 1tb models which work great.

Firmware is latest (though Samsung brightly chose NOT to increment the version number in their recent release) purely because of their manufacture date. I also installed all the latest Intel Rapid Storage drivers as suggested elsewhere but the drives are still rubbish.

So people, any ideas? I've never really had hard drive issues before of this type so I'm a bit lost.

Oh, while I remember, the drives are reported as only supporting UDMA-6 which is a bit crap, that's after installing the latest Intel Rapid Storage drivers. Before that (just using latest Intel chipset drivers) they were reported as supporting UDMA-7 but only connecting at UDMA-6.

FYI: my motherboard is an ASUS P5Q SE2 with the ACH10R controller. Drives are all in ACHI mode. There are NO BIOS updates available regarding this issue.

As JUST these new drives have the slow write issue and ALL other drives in the system are 100% fine there MUST be some issue with these drives. I mean, why would they have suck an unacceptably slow write speed?

Any thoughts / ideas welcome - these drives are in my media machine and dumping stuff to them is painful! I expect I'd have gone mad(er) already if I was transfering RAW video stuff to these drives!

Cheers,

Scoob.

 

[ionicle]

whip em out, use em in a usb enclosure as a EHD and buy something a bit different

or use em as a storage drive for somthing not very important, pictures maybe? that dont take a lot of loading.

 

[Scoob]

whip em out, use em in a usb enclosure as a EHD and buy something a bit different

or use em as a storage drive for somthing not very important, pictures maybe? that dont take a lot of loading.

Well, if it wasn't for the current HDD shortage I'd have returned them and replaced them with another brand by now. As things stand I cannot replace them without having to spend a lot more - which I'm not prepared to do.

I've no use for them in any other application unfortunately, they were bought for a purpose and, sadly, it's a purpose they are ill equipped to perform.

I still hope there's some fix that can be applied as I cannot believe for a second that Samsung would release such a poor-performing drive deliberately. I'll try to get some more details on the drive in case there's an old-skool jumper setting somewhere I can set lol.

Cheers,

Scoob.

 

[sheroo]

What OS are you using the advanced format drives with?

Just noticed you're using W7 64. Pretty sure the write problem will be due the drive being advanced format but Windows defaulting to 512K blocks. Normally a jumper is used to set the advanced format drives to standard format not the other way around. Don't know why Windows is doing that - have you tried formatting it on another W7 PC?

 

[Scoob]

What OS are you using the advanced format drives with?

Just noticed you're using W7 64. Pretty sure the write problem will be due the drive being advanced format but Windows defaulting to 512K blocks. Normally a jumper is used to set the advanced format drives to standard format not the other way around. Don't know why Windows is doing that - have you tried formatting it on another W7 PC?

Hi mate,

Yeah, something is odd for sure. I didn't really look to hard when initially setting up the drives so possibly I missed something. There actually aren't any jumpers on this drive - at least the little manual says not. I might dump the data off one of them to elsewhere & try formotting again but making sure it correctly goes to 4k blocks. My understanding was that W7 should have correctly defaulted to this anyway...

I'll do some more testing when I have a moment (well, lots of moments as there's a fair bit of data) I guess I'm disappointed that, for the first time that I can rememeber, a drive didn't just work. It's not like I'm playing around with RAID or anything.

Cheers,

Scoob.

 

[sheroo]

I agree W7 should have defaulted to formatting in 4K blocks. The WD20EARS drives that I have in my WHS needed a jumper to default them to 512K blocks. You might be able to upgrade the firmware on the drives?

 

[Scoob]

I agree W7 should have defaulted to formatting in 4K blocks. The WD20EARS drives that I have in my WHS needed a jumper to default them to 512K blocks. You might be able to upgrade the firmware on the drives?

Well, Samsung rather arrogantly state that they don't do firmware updates because "They're so thoroughly tested" that they don't need to. Must be why the update they did release late last year for these drives had the same exact firmware revision number.

I can certainly try to force 1k blocks somehow, however, I'd not expect performance to be so poor with 512k blocks, especially considering reading is fine, it's just writing. Still, we shall see how I get on. Just backing up the data over a couple of smaller drives now - luckily READ operations on these drives are fine so it shouldn't take too long...

Scoob.

 

[Scoob]

Hmm, copying TO one of my older 1tb Samsungs it's sustaining just over 97mB/s - to be honest I'd expect better than that from the newer drive, not a third! Something is certainly not right...

Edit: Just found out some more info....looks like these drives deliberately identify themselvea as 512k blocks to the OS rather than the 4k they actually are. This is some sort of internal emulation so they work with older OS's. Nice, but it means they DON'T configure correctly on W7...looks like I have no choice but to re-format. Hope this fixes the p*ss poor write performance...

Scoob.

 

[Scoob]

Hi,

Right, a quick update for those that are reading...

I backed up all my data from one of the Samsung HD204UI 2tb 5,400rpm drives and reformatted it forcing 4k blocks rather than the incorrect default of .5k.

I'm now copying the dats back at around THREE TIMES the speed I could previously write to this drive.

So, these Samsungs have rubbish write speeds because they incorrectly announce themselves to the OS as only .5k block compatable. Now, I can see how this feature would be good for older systems in that the drive would likely just work. However, normally I'd expect the onus of effort to be on those with the older hardware/software rather than the current hardware the kit is actually designed to run on at fully speed. Still, lesson learnt.

Cheers,

Scoob.

 

[sheroo]

Sounds good, as a matter of interest how did you force it?

 

[Scoob]

Sounds good, as a matter of interest how did you force it?

Really simple, under disk management select format then select the block size. I chose "default" the first time, incorrectly assuming this would be 4k blocks on a 4k block-size HDD under W7. Silly me. Now I realise of course it defaulted to .5k all along due to the false information exposed to the OS by the drive. So this time I explicitly selected the 4k blocksize which should really be the default.

Drive is still holding over 90mB/s write speed restoring my data, which is cool. Just need to do it with two more drives over the next day or so...

Scoob.

 

[Scoob]

Ah, there's my luck!

The drive I copied much of my data TO took it without a complaint. Now I'm reading it back it's giving me surface errors!

Why would a disk pass a write operations without warning then fail massively (48 sector read fails so far) when reading it back? I thought drives usually failed on the write operation if anything, i.e. the written data could not be verified.

Looks like I replaced the older 1tb drives just in time, however Samsungs F'ing stupid defaults caused me to need to use them again. Ok, no more Samsung drives for me, they've gone down hill too far...my friends younger 1tb Samsung just failed recently too...

Scoob.

 

[sheroo]

Sounds like all you need on a Sunday night.

 

[Scoob]

Sounds like all you need on a Sunday night.

Indeed!

To make things worse I tried to resume the copying this morning only to find I get "access denied" for ALL of my backups - even the ones I did successfully copy previously. The stuff on the newly reformatted 2tb drive is ok, it's just the stuff on the older 1tb that doesn't even show my ID on the perms list - even though I created the data. My account is the only admin account for security and even it doesn't have perms to change this *sigh*

Samsung of OFF my list for good now...that's one bugged drive that formats wrong and another that failed. Bad BAD product.

Scoob.

 

[Scoob]

After all that effort, and with one of my older drives failing, my write speeds on the 2tb drive have dropped to a third of what they were after formatting with 4k blocks...don't know why.

ALL tools I try report the drive as only 512 block, but I assumes that's just reading the drive info rather than checking the real format...ah well.

Scoob.

 

[Scoob]

Hi,

Not sure who's still reading but I have some additional information that surprised me.

These drives write slow (~30mB/s) if they are under 20c. Yep, that's right. I did some testing running one of these drives at 20c and it was fast, 90mB/s write fast. I let it cool down to 19c and it was slow again.

Maybe it's just me but I rarely have the heating up high and I felt plenty warm enough in the room when the drives are averaging around 18c. Thing is at this temperature they are just plain slow when it comes to writing. Odd eh?

My older 1tb Samsungs don't have this feature.

So, anyone know why this has been implemented? Seems odd to me, I mean, 19c is hardly cold! If the thing wanted to go slow if it was overheating I'd get that, or if maybe it was freezing, but this 20c threshshold I really don't get.

It's funny, I've always done what I can to keep my drives running nice and cool, in my experience hot drives die very quickly. Ideally a drive getting no warmer that mid-30's is about right for me.

So, question, there's a large aftermarket for PC cooling products, where do I find some PC heating stuff? lol.

Hope this information is of use.

 

[sheroo]

That it utterly bizzare. But 19C is very cool - I can't remember seeing my drives as low as that and they are in an unheated room.

 

[BaMb1N0]

looks like it's not aligned well. samsung does offer an alignment tool and - most important - an imageing software in order to backup a drive, realign it and restore the backup.

 

[Scoob]

Hi,

Well, they're 5,400rpm drives so don't really generate that much heat. My older 1tb samsungs (also 5,400rpm) run at a similar temperature.

Oh, the drives are properly aligned I checked that. Though I do think the 4k format issue was a read-herring. Any tool that just queries the drive will say "512B blocks" any tool (such as check disk) which actually bothers to look properly will see they are 4k formatted. I think as I'd just been using the drive so much (backup, reformat etc.) it got above 20c so speeded up lol.

It really is silly though, the moment the drive hits 20c it writes at 3x the speed - reads are unaffected. I always get my drives to spin down after a few minutes of not being used, however that means they'll likely still be cold when they're needed so perform badly.

Maybe if the house was kept warmer I'd never have had an issue, but I hate it being hot inside personally.

So, basically the drive is fine, it's formatted fine but it has some sensor that hugely limits the write performance if the drive drops below 20c. Wierd. Sh*t. lol.

Edit: Just checked my gateway machine, it's got two older Samsung 500gb 7,200rpm drive in it, one is currently at 19c (system drive) the other is at 18c. A 500gb Western Digital drive in the same box is at 21c. I deliberately keep my drives cool as they last longer that way. This is the first time I've had a drive actually nerf its own performance when cool.

Scoob.

 

[sheroo]

http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/massive-google-hard-drive-survey-turns-up-very-interesting-thing/

From the google hard drive study:-

"drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot"