Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

I saw in Fry's San Jose ad today they were selling these
Serial-ATA/300 drives for $67. They didn't give a model number but
scouting around a bit on the web I'm guessing they are a discontinued
model.

Any inputs on whether these are drives that work well with mdadm RAID?
Do they support TLER and otherwise work well?

This would just be a home server of some type, nothing industrial.
Probably a 3 drive RAID-1 or something like that.

Comments?

Thanks,
Mark
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Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

On 29/10/2010 00:17, Mark Knecht wrote:
> I saw in Fry's San Jose ad today they were selling these
> Serial-ATA/300 drives for $67. They didn't give a model number but
> scouting around a bit on the web I'm guessing they are a discontinued
> model.
>
> Any inputs on whether these are drives that work well with mdadm RAID?
> Do they support TLER and otherwise work well?
>
> This would just be a home server of some type, nothing industrial.
> Probably a 3 drive RAID-1 or something like that.
>
> Comments?

Well, they're perhaps not great. I bought three and after only about a
thousand hours one of them was giving SMART errors, then after about
7,500 hours a second one started doing it too. At that point I replaced
both with other makes, copying over with ddrescue (or maybe it was
dd_rescue), which worked without any failed sectors, then ran badblocks
-w on the Samsungs and the SMART errors went away. The third one of mine
is still fine, and the other two are now in a ReadyNAS giving good service.

Somebody else on this list recently reported problems with them, though
that may have been more controller-related than a real problem with the
drives.

But yes you can set TLER on them (with a custom-built smartmontools from
SVN or the recently-released 5.40).

Cheers,

John.

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Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 4:37 PM, John Robinson
wrote:
> On 29/10/2010 00:17, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>
>> I saw in Fry's San Jose ad today they were selling these
>> Serial-ATA/300 drives for $67. They didn't give a model number but
>> scouting around a bit on the web I'm guessing they are a discontinued
>> model.
>>
>> Any inputs on whether these are drives that work well with mdadm RAID?
>> Do they support TLER and otherwise work well?
>>
>> This would just be a home server of some type, nothing industrial.
>> Probably a 3 drive RAID-1 or something like that.
>>
>> Comments?
>
> Well, they're perhaps not great. I bought three and after only about a
> thousand hours one of them was giving SMART errors, then after about 7,500
> hours a second one started doing it too. At that point I replaced both with
> other makes, copying over with ddrescue (or maybe it was dd_rescue), which
> worked without any failed sectors, then ran badblocks -w on the Samsungs and
> the SMART errors went away. The third one of mine is still fine, and the
> other two are now in a ReadyNAS giving good service.
>
> Somebody else on this list recently reported problems with them, though that
> may have been more controller-related than a real problem with the drives.
>
> But yes you can set TLER on them (with a custom-built smartmontools from SVN
> or the recently-released 5.40).
>
> Cheers,
>
> John.
>
>
Thanks John - I think I'll skip them.

Cheers,
Mark
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Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

Mark Knecht wrote:
> I saw in Fry's San Jose ad today they were selling these
> Serial-ATA/300 drives for $67. They didn't give a model number but
> scouting around a bit on the web I'm guessing they are a discontinued
> model.
>
> Any inputs on whether these are drives that work well with mdadm RAID?
> Do they support TLER and otherwise work well?
>
> This would just be a home server of some type, nothing industrial.
> Probably a 3 drive RAID-1 or something like that.
>
> Comments?
>

Newegg has prices like that regularly. On brand name drives, like
Seagate, Hitachi, and WD, too, if you prefer.

--
Bill Davidsen
"We can't solve today's problems by using the same thinking we
used in creating them." - Einstein

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Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 4:37 PM, John Robinson
wrote:
> On 29/10/2010 00:17, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> I saw in Fry's San Jose ad today they were selling these
>> Serial-ATA/300 drives for $67. They didn't give a model number but
>> scouting around a bit on the web I'm guessing they are a discontinued
>> model.
>>
>> Any inputs on whether these are drives that work well with mdadm RAID?
>> Do they support TLER and otherwise work well?
>>
>> This would just be a home server of some type, nothing industrial.
>> Probably a 3 drive RAID-1 or something like that.
>
> Well, they're perhaps not great. I bought three and after only about a
> thousand hours one of them was giving SMART errors, then after about 7,500
> hours a second one started doing it too. At that point I replaced both with
> other makes, copying over with ddrescue (or maybe it was dd_rescue), which
> worked without any failed sectors, then ran badblocks -w on the Samsungs and
> the SMART errors went away. The third one of mine is still fine, and the
> other two are now in a ReadyNAS giving good service.

I think that using two different brand drives in general is a good idea.

We recently had 2 500 GB WD5000AAKS drives die at the same time over a
weekend. Both of them suffered from the same death and would no
longer spin up - just making a clicking/whirring sound when you
powered it on.

Luckily we had backups for most of the data on there, but some
non-critical (but time consuming to manually restore) data had to be
reconstructed.

I understand that drives from the same batch will often die around the
same period of time - from now on we plan on trying to use dissimilar
drives when possible.

First time we've seen 2 drives in one array die that close together
and that catastrophically, though.

-Dave
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RE: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

> -----Original Message-----
> From: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org [mailto:linux-raid-
> owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of David Rees
> Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 4:26 PM
> To: John Robinson
> Cc: Mark Knecht; Linux-RAID
> Subject: Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives
>
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 4:37 PM, John Robinson
> wrote:
> > On 29/10/2010 00:17, Mark Knecht wrote:
> >> I saw in Fry's San Jose ad today they were selling these
> >> Serial-ATA/300 drives for $67. They didn't give a model number but
> >> scouting around a bit on the web I'm guessing they are a discontinued
> >> model.
> >>
> >> Any inputs on whether these are drives that work well with mdadm RAID?
> >> Do they support TLER and otherwise work well?
> >>
> >> This would just be a home server of some type, nothing industrial.
> >> Probably a 3 drive RAID-1 or something like that.
> >
> > Well, they're perhaps not great. I bought three and after only about a
> > thousand hours one of them was giving SMART errors, then after about
> 7,500
> > hours a second one started doing it too. At that point I replaced both
> with
> > other makes, copying over with ddrescue (or maybe it was dd_rescue),
> which
> > worked without any failed sectors, then ran badblocks -w on the Samsungs
> and
> > the SMART errors went away. The third one of mine is still fine, and the
> > other two are now in a ReadyNAS giving good service.
>
> I think that using two different brand drives in general is a good idea.
>
> We recently had 2 500 GB WD5000AAKS drives die at the same time over a
> weekend. Both of them suffered from the same death and would no
> longer spin up - just making a clicking/whirring sound when you
> powered it on.
>
> Luckily we had backups for most of the data on there, but some
> non-critical (but time consuming to manually restore) data had to be
> reconstructed.
>
> I understand that drives from the same batch will often die around the
> same period of time - from now on we plan on trying to use dissimilar
> drives when possible.
>
> First time we've seen 2 drives in one array die that close together
> and that catastrophically, though.

I had 4 Seagate drives go bad all at once on a 10 drive array.
Fortunately, the drives did not die entirely. Indeed, I'm still not sure
what is wrong with them. They seem to read and write just fine, but if they
are added back to the array and the array is asked to access data with a
high seek rate (read or write), the drives get kicked from the array.
Relatively low seek rates allow the drives to continue to be array members,
and when the drives get kicked, they can always be added back. I was able
to use ddrescue to read the data 100% without any failures. Had the array
been unrecoverable, I had backups, of course, but I did not have to resort
to them. I'm not entirely sure when the drives all went bad, but it was
within a week or two of each other.

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Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

Leslie Rhorer wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org [mailto:linux-raid-
>> owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of David Rees
>> Sent: Monday, November 01, 2010 4:26 PM
>> To: John Robinson
>> Cc: Mark Knecht; Linux-RAID
>> Subject: Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 4:37 PM, John Robinson
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 29/10/2010 00:17, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>>
>>>> I saw in Fry's San Jose ad today they were selling these
>>>> Serial-ATA/300 drives for $67. They didn't give a model number but
>>>> scouting around a bit on the web I'm guessing they are a discontinued
>>>> model.
>>>>
>>>> Any inputs on whether these are drives that work well with mdadm RAID?
>>>> Do they support TLER and otherwise work well?
>>>>
>>>> This would just be a home server of some type, nothing industrial.
>>>> Probably a 3 drive RAID-1 or something like that.
>>>>
>>> Well, they're perhaps not great. I bought three and after only about a
>>> thousand hours one of them was giving SMART errors, then after about
>>>
>> 7,500
>>
>>> hours a second one started doing it too. At that point I replaced both
>>>
>> with
>>
>>> other makes, copying over with ddrescue (or maybe it was dd_rescue),
>>>
>> which
>>
>>> worked without any failed sectors, then ran badblocks -w on the Samsungs
>>>
>> and
>>
>>> the SMART errors went away. The third one of mine is still fine, and the
>>> other two are now in a ReadyNAS giving good service.
>>>
>> I think that using two different brand drives in general is a good idea.
>>
>> We recently had 2 500 GB WD5000AAKS drives die at the same time over a
>> weekend. Both of them suffered from the same death and would no
>> longer spin up - just making a clicking/whirring sound when you
>> powered it on.
>>
>> Luckily we had backups for most of the data on there, but some
>> non-critical (but time consuming to manually restore) data had to be
>> reconstructed.
>>
>> I understand that drives from the same batch will often die around the
>> same period of time - from now on we plan on trying to use dissimilar
>> drives when possible.
>>
>> First time we've seen 2 drives in one array die that close together
>> and that catastrophically, though.
>>
> I had 4 Seagate drives go bad all at once on a 10 drive array.
> Fortunately, the drives did not die entirely. Indeed, I'm still not sure
> what is wrong with them. They seem to read and write just fine, but if they
> are added back to the array and the array is asked to access data with a
> high seek rate (read or write), the drives get kicked from the array.
> Relatively low seek rates allow the drives to continue to be array members,
> and when the drives get kicked, they can always be added back. I was able
> to use ddrescue to read the data 100% without any failures. Had the array
> been unrecoverable, I had backups, of course, but I did not have to resort
> to them. I'm not entirely sure when the drives all went bad, but it was
> within a week or two of each other.
>

One possible cause for this is a marginal power supply which "can't keep
up" when supporting lots of seeks and transfers on multiple drives. In
every group of drives there will be some variance for low voltage (or
noise, more likely) and the drive(s) which are sensitive appear to fail.
I say this from experience, it does happen, and going to a better power
supply will cure it. This might not be the problem, of course, but it's
worth investigating before blaming the drives.

The sad truth is that if you have this problem and replace the weakest
drives, it's likely that some other drive will become the weak sister
and fail, leading to people saying "oh, those {vendor} drives are crap,
I had {number} fail on me, one after the other." Have you heard that?
Me, too! Check before replacing or scrapping drives!

--
Bill Davidsen
"We can't solve today's problems by using the same thinking we
used in creating them." - Einstein

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Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

On 03/11/2010 17:04, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Leslie Rhorer wrote:
[...]
>> I'm not entirely sure when the drives all went bad, but it was
>> within a week or two of each other.
>
> One possible cause for this is a marginal power supply which "can't keep
> up" when supporting lots of seeks and transfers on multiple drives. In
> every group of drives there will be some variance for low voltage (or
> noise, more likely) and the drive(s) which are sensitive appear to fail.
> I say this from experience, it does happen, and going to a better power
> supply will cure it. This might not be the problem, of course, but it's
> worth investigating before blaming the drives.

Yes, marginal PSUs can be, well, marginal, but it seems even half decent
PSUs can exhibit this behaviour as well, to some extent. So having read
the above I thought I'd look up some data sheets to see why this might
happen.

The spec for Seagate Constellation ES 1GB drives -
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/ente rprise/Constellation%203_5%20in/100516232f.pdf
- does say that while the average idle power is 5W[1], and the typical
peak operating power is 7W, the maximum transition power (whatever that
is) is 40W - yes, 40W - so I can well see a bundle of relatively
low-power drives placing some heavy stresses on an average or even
average-to-good PSU.

My rule of thumb of late is to expect 7.2k drives to draw ~7W, 10k ~10W
and 15k ~15W, then add a margin for safety and power-up, but having read
the above noted I might double it and make the margin bigger...

Cheers,

John.
[1] Rounded up to the nearest W.
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Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

On 04/11/10 01:54, John Robinson wrote:
> operating power is 7W, the maximum transition power (whatever that is)
> is 40W - yes, 40W

I'd guess this is either during spin-up, (or spin speed change if
enabled), or possibly even the "inrush" current when power is first
applied to the device (i.e. only for a few milliseconds when the machine
is turned on), and so probably wouldn't cause much of a problem unless.

To check for such transient power supply issues, you need a good fast
(expensive) digital scope, I'd guess - so that you can catch very
short-lived ("transient") spikes or sags in the supply voltages, but you
can do some quite easy checks to see if any of the speced currents are
being exceeded (or are near the specified limits) over longer periods
using a "DC Current Clamp" - such as a "UT203" clamp which I bought on
ebay for about US$30.

A quick search showed that there are other models available at about
double the price which have an "inrush" function which presumably
measures the peak transient current e.g. "Mastech MS2108" - so this
might be a good compromise before splashing out loads of cash on a
digital scope.

Using a clamp meter is pretty easy - you just get all the individual
wires of a particular voltage for the power supply (e.g. all the yellow
12v wires), and place the jaws of the clamp around those wires only -
such that they are all "pointing the same way" i.e. the power-supply
side is all on one side of the meter, and the power-consumers are all on
the other side of the meter.

i.e.

PSU--------------+------------->Drive
PSU--------------+------------->Drive
PSU--------------+------------->Drive
PSU--------------+------------->Drive
PSU--------------+------------->Drive
PSU--------------+------------->Motherboard

with the clamp passed around the wires where the '+' is.

The DC current in the wires induces a circular magnetic field in the
clamp jaws, and this in turn "bends" the average path of a small current
across a flat piece of silicon inside the meter - because the path is no
longer "straight across from A to B" in the silicon but instead takes a
longer route: the stronger the magnetic field, the higher apparent
resistance of the silicon (known as the "Hall effect").

.... then you read off the measured current on the meter, check the spec
sheet for the power supply (or sometimes the ratings sticker) to see
what the max draw at 12v is, then repeat for 5v (red), 3.3v (orange) etc....

Tim.

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Re: Samsung F1 RAID Class SATA/300 1TB drives

On 04/11/2010 10:34, Tim Small wrote:
> On 04/11/10 01:54, John Robinson wrote:
>> operating power is 7W, the maximum transition power (whatever that is)
>> is 40W - yes, 40W
>
> I'd guess this is either during spin-up, (or spin speed change if
> enabled), or possibly even the "inrush" current when power is first
> applied to the device (i.e. only for a few milliseconds when the machine
> is turned on), and so probably wouldn't cause much of a problem unless.

Yes, reading the spec more closely indicates that this transition power
is the drive waking up from its lowest power-saving mode, so it's
spinning up the discs, so that's not going to be happening much.

In second place after spin-up events, from the same spec, we have peak
power during random reads of 24W, and 26W for writes, still more than 3
times the average operating power. I take "random reads" to mean lots of
seeks, so as Bill said, heavy seeking could be rather rough on a PSU.

Cheers,

John.
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