dfr wrote:
Thank you fzabkar and Vulcan for your replies.
You're welcome
dfr wrote:
Of course I e-mailed Verbatim, before I even posted on the forum. Still waiting for replies.
OK - you didn't mention you'd done that, so I didn't know...
My previous comments still apply about Verbatim being the right people for you to talk to IMHO, especially since you seem to be concerned about not opening the USB enclosure, and so that appears to be your limiting factor.
dfr wrote:
So the only time these problem with f/w can occur, when the disk is in such enclosure, is when I try SMART reading tools, right?
No - that's just the best example.
Anything which causes the USB-to-SATA bridge chip to send ATA Identify Device commands to the drive, while SATA NCQ Writes are also in progress, is a potential risk.
Has
that bridge chip enabled SATA NCQ (i.e. is it sending SATA Write FPDMA Queued commands, and not PIO Write commands, to the drive)? No idea - those chips are not my specialist area. Ask Verbatim
dfr wrote:
Microsoft's Sector Inspector and surface scanning software I can try to use safely?
Not necessarily (though IMHO it is
unlikely that Sector Inspector and basic surface scanning programs would cause ATA Identify Device commands to be sent).
However I can think of a couple of ways in which software (even those which you mention above) could
potentially cause the bridge chip to send ATA Identify Device commands - but the details are too long for now, and would just be a hypothesis anyway, without having a USB trace (or preferably SATA trace) when running whatever software you would specifically want to test.
Also, if the USB-to-SATA bridge chip is
not sending SATA NCQ commands, then you're safe, even if ATA Identify Device commands are being sent to the drive at the same time.
dfr wrote:
Quote:
(although in the UK we are not specifically limited by such a warranty).
What do you mean?
Very similar to what
fzabkar kindly explained applies in Australia. In the UK, the consumer's contract is not with the manufacturer; it's with the retailer. So any warranty from the manufacturer is in addition to (and not instead of) the consumer's rights for merchantable quality & "reasonable" durability, against the retailer. IANAL so I won't go into more detail here - you can see the various revisions of the UK "Sale of Goods [& Services]" Acts if you are interested
dfr wrote:
Quote:
In fact it is the 7 year US warranty which looks to be unusually generous IMHO.
There is often lifetime warranty over there for some products.
That just shows that the typical expectations are different in different countries. To me,
here in the UK, a 7 year warranty for an external USB drive would be very, very generous, as I said before. This difference in length of warranties isn't a "Verbatim thing", it's a "different countries thing". Here is a link to the (now discontinued) external 1TB USB disk which a friend of mine bought a little while ago, here in the UK - again a 2-year warranty, this time from Hitachi:
http://www.overclock.co.uk/product/Hitachi-1TB-XL1000-USB-2.0-External-Hard-Drive,-Retail-Kit_28474.htmlI hope that explains why I'm not getting excited about Verbatim "only" offering a 2 year warranty also
So in summary, your Verbatim-branded USB enclosure might not create the conditions to trigger that disk f/w bug, if it doesn't use SATA NCQ commands. IMHO the best people to answer that question are Verbatim, unless you can find enough details on the bridge chip to completely eliminate that possibility of it using NCQ yourself, from its datasheet.
Have you considered collecting the USB bridge chip VID & PID, and attempting to identify the bridge chip? You might succeed in identifying that chip, but you might not (depending on whether Verbatim use a custom VID/PID or leave it at the manufacturer's default). If you physically looked at the chip, then you'd have a much better chance to see what it "really" is (without relying on the VID/PID), but I remember that you don't want to open the USB enclosure.
Therefore the 3 options which I can think of, for you to choose between are:
- Change your mind and open the USB enclosure to look at the bridge chip; but if you're going to do that, then you might as well take out the Samsung drive, update its f/w via SATA direct attach, and sleep happily
or
- Try to identify the bridge chip via USB VID/PID and/or Google searches from people who have opened
exactly the same enclosure. Then search for a datasheet on that bridge chip, and hope that SATA NCQ is not a feature or even an option (because if it is an option, you won't know if that option has been enabled by Verbatim in your enclosure or not). If you can rule out SATA NCQ being used, then you should be safe, even without updating the drive f/w.
or
- Ask Verbatim
Right, I'm off back to the day job - have fun