I currently have a brand new (made November 2011, in China) Samsung HN-M750MBB hard drive - SATA, 2.5 inch, 750 GB.

After testing the drive out in a USB enclosure, I got a little concerned when the SMART was reporting a 1 for the write error rate. I put it into a computer properly and ran MHDD.

MHDD has reported a fair mix of <3ms blocks and <10ms blocks with occasional <50ms blocks. The number of blocks that are <10ms are roughly 10% of the number of <3ms blocks.

However, what is concerning, really, is the pattern. Although in some sections of the drive, a pattern not entirely unlike a chess board does show up, in others, there are "streaks," or "stripes" - in some a single stripe just goes straight down for several rows. In others, they are "diagonal" (and a bit broken up), pointing off to the lower left or right. The blocks making up the lines are <10ms blocks amidst <3ms blocks, with occasional <50ms blocks in there.

There are also occasionally large, thick stripes of nothing but <3ms blocks in there (pointing towards the lower right) amidst these stripes.

The machine it is in for testing with MHDD is a Dell Inspiron 1720, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 6 GB of RAM and an nVidia 8600GT circa summer of 2008.

In short, should I return this drive or not? I'd include a screen shot but the resources I have available right now make that prohibitive. I am, however, running out of time to return it, and this Samsung may be one of the few new Samsungs left before Seagate ate them. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

How long has this drive been in use?

What are the values for the reallocated and the pending sector entries?

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

It's brand new. It has less than 200 hours of running time (don't recall the exact number), but it's been out of the package less than two weeks.

It also has 0 sectors pending and 0 reallocated. The only SMART error it has that I've seen thus far is the write rate error ticked up by 1 - though it's possible that that's due to using it in an enclosure for some of the testing (although the enclosure is good, I suppose I could have bumped the USB cable or something). That said, I can't recall if such a thing may have happened or not.

As a further update, one scan showed:

<3ms blocks: 4961184
<10ms blocks: 784178
<50ms blocks: 321
<500ms blocks: 1

Another scan showed NO <500 ms blocks.

The ratio of <10ms blocks to <3ms blocks increased the further it went on the scan, and the average distance between <10ms blocks (with the gaps being made of <3ms blocks) decreased. Speed roughly halved, coming in at around 90 MB/sec at the beginning and somewhere around 40 MB/sec at the end.

The software I've used has been MHDD, Passmark DiskCheck, HDDScan (which reported some groups of blocks - it wasn't too specific - taking anywhere from a bit less than 100 ms to nearly 6000 ms to respond), HDDTune, HD Sentinel, chkdsk, and smarttools for Win32.

Passmark Diskcheck DID detect a drop of the Raw Read Error value from 252 to 100 VERY early in the drive's life, though other (non-Samsung) "healthy" drives I've worked with seem to have that for this value, and it seems to have happened around the time a few other indicators repeated that exact pattern, so I'm thinking it was the result of either the very first scan I ran, or the format I ran on the drive early on. Almost seemed like initialization behavior of the SMART system.

It DID run several degrees hotter than a Hitachi I was also testing (which I am taking back due to a reallocated sector) and an internal WD drive I got readings on at the same time. The enclosure it was in was one of those "toaster" type enclosures, wherein you slip in the drive on the top like a video game cartridge. The enclosure has worked well for me for several years so I don't think there's a problem with it.

Well, it is a relatively healthy drive.

If you were to try to RMA this drive, you would have a hard time proving the drive is faulty.

I would say keep using it, but make sure you have back up.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts