Samsung 1TB SpinPoint F3 faulty now working, can I still RMA it?

luke_c

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Aug 29, 2012
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I have a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 as a storage drive, ever since I got it last year it's been incredibly loud, way louder than I'm sure it should be, and I'm sure it's on its last legs now.

Anyway, yesterday I was playing the Firefall beta, when the game crashed and my PC kept locking up, this continued for a few minutes until eventually my PC just froze completely, no BSOD or anything, it just froze.

I checked all my temps and they were all fine, I turned my PC off and back on and it kept happening, except this time my PC didn't freeze, after one of the lock-ups my HDD disappeared from My Computer.

When I restarted I was met with requiring a Chkdsk for the drive which showed all file record segments after about 50,000 or so unreadable, reading online this seems to mean imminent death for the drive. After about an hour or so I just turned off the check and rebooted as I knew it would take hours, skipping it, I done a test with SeaTools which it failed on the Short Drive Self Test with "6C9AC2A4
Serial number not detected, SeaTools did fail the drive" the HDD was still playing up and I couldn't transfer any files across without it freezing and again disappearing.

Next I booted into a gParted live CD and I done something to the HDD, it was something like scan and repair the drive on the main partition, which it completed in 4 seconds. I then booted back into Windows to find the hard drive seemingly working fine, except the extremely loud noises still when it's being read/write and it passed all SeaTools tests.

Can I still RMA the drive? I'm sure it's going to fail again and this is a temporary fix, I don't want to wait for it to start playing up again as when it kept locking up it corrupted my SSDs boot manager which took an awful long time for me to fix, I've been meaning to upgrade to a 2TB drive anyway and the sooner the better, I'm just sick of this hard drive's constant noise and it playing up, will they accept a RMA for it?
 

price_th

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Jan 29, 2012
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Why don't you go to Samsung support and ask them. I'm thinking they would have the final say. Also depends if it is still under warranty which you should be able to determine from their support site as well.
 

luke_c

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Aug 29, 2012
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SeaGate say to use their tools as they own Samsung's HDD division.


The drive is under warranty but since I bought it the drive is now under SeaGate as they bought Samsung's HDD divison.