Samsung HD 204UI and SMART

[ronbo613]

Being a photographer and videographer, I use a lot of hard drives. With the bad reviews of larger capacity drives, I've stuck to 1TB drives, mostly WD Blacks and a few Seagates. I decided to take a chance on a Samsung HD 204UI 2TB EcoGreen 5400rpm drive. Never had a Samsung before and I knew there were a few issues with it, but 2TB(1.81 actually) for $80 was too good to pass up.
First off, these drives need a firmware update before installation. Made a bootable USB flash drive and updated the firmware, but the firmware version number did not change. This is a known issue. Then, I ran a long surface test(about 6 hours) using Samsung's diagnostic program and came up with no errors.
Put some data on it, defragged and ran SeaTools and saw that the new Samsung and one of my Seagate 1TB drives failed the SMART test. Ran HD Tune and HDD Scan on the Samsung, it does not return any SMART data or temperature information.
I'm not sure what this means, but I am going to run the crap out of this drive to make sure if it is going to fail, it will do so within the Newegg 30 day refund/exchange period.
What does failing SMART tests basically mean? Both the Samsung and Seagate that failed seem to be working normally.

 

[ronbo613]

Not like I'm talking to myself or anything, but I figured out what was going on.
Because all my SATA ports on my Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4 ver.1 motherboard are being used, the two drives(Samsung 204UI and Seagate 1TB) showing SMART errors are connected to a Marvell 9128 controller. Drives in these ports don't act like drives on the Intel P55 controller; no SMART info and they don't show up in imaging/cloning software like Acronis.
Problem solved.