This is driving me nuts!!! I have 3 hard drives; A Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ 750GB, Samsung Spinpoint HD501J 500GB, Samsung Spinpoint SP2504C 250GB. Connected to an Asus P5K Premium/AP-WiFi Black Pearl Edition Rev 2 00 G updated to the latest BIOS 0712 The problem I am having is with the HD501J. Whenever I have the hard drive connected to the system the operating system hangs and stops operating for a few seconds then suddenly all the clicks happen all at once. This can be really annoying. I have had a problem with the HD501J in my previous setup before I upgraded my system and it used to do the same thing and it did that clicking sound. I ran the Samsung Diagnostic tool ESTOOL.exe from their website and that verified that there were errors with the hard drive. Since then I have had the hard drive RMA'd and ebuyer confirmed that it was faulty and have now issued me with a replacement refurbished hard drive manufactured May 2008. This refurbished hard drive I have now put it into the rig with the other two hard drives and it still causes this annoying hang ups. Just to confirm that it was the hard drive. I disconnected all the hard drives and just left the HD753LJ (BOOT) connected and I booted up to vista 64 and copied and drag folders from one partition to another browsed the web opened email, etc etc and it seems to be fine. I then shut down and plug the 753 and the 501 together and do the same test as outlined above. This produced hang ups. especially when copying 200MB+ folders from the 753 to the 501 and vice versa. Even deleting files from the 501 causes problems. I have the 753 scaled down from its original setup of 3GB/S SATAII to 1.5GB/S SATAI as for some reason the SATAII configuration is incompatible with my motherboard. I have tried to do the same to the 501 by patching it to run from SATAII to SATAI and this still causes problems.. So both, in SATAI and SATAII it is causing these hangups. I then tested with the 753 and the 250 and that seems to work fine by running the series of tests outlined above. (I have also had to "jumper" the 250 to SATAI as it does not work well with my hard drive on SATAII)*. *The 250 used jumper switch instead of a software patch to scale from SATAII to SATAI. I have ran HD TACH 8mb test on all 3 hard drives and they all performed well (including the 501). I have heard that there are incompatibility problems with the P5K Premium and Samsung hard drives. But this is driving me insane. I am now running the Diagnostic tool on the 501 and so far no errors. What I don't want to do, is RMA the hard drive to be sent back to ebuyer, they test it and realise that its fine, charge me for testing it and then charge me postage to get it sent back to me. What do I do???? Help would be much appreciated. Sorry if I have ranted on a bit. deltaworld Q6600 G0 @ 3.06Ghz| P5K Premium/WiFi-AP Black Pearl | OCZ PC2-8500 Reaper 2x2GB | 650W PSU | 750GB HD753LJ | 500GB HD501J| 250GB SP2504C| BFG 8800 GTS OC 512MB | Xi-Fi XtremeGamer | NEC ND-2510a | Razer DeathAdder | MS Reclusa | z-680 5.1 | Samsung 226BW
I think you've diagnosed the problem tbh mate - it sounds like you're suffering from the compatibility problems between your P5K and Samsung HDD's. Try swapping it with someone else with a 500GB drive?
I'm not really liking the word "refurbished" here. Where my precious data is concerned I'd rather not be using a drive that evidently has already been damaged and then repaired to be resold. I'd take that HDD out of my system and, if at all, use it as an external drive, always expecting it to fail. I'm also not too keen on the Spinpoint F1 with all the problems this series has had, but it seems to work well for you at this moment, so that's good at least. Sorry for sounding alarmist, but I like to err on the side of caution, especially when it comes to hard disk drives.
When they send you a replacement HDD it should be new not refurbished, pull them up on that. Unless the original you bought was a refurbished HDD you have every right to expect a brand new HDD as a replacement.
I do apologise to everyone, I had originally mis-read the replacement email that I had received from ebuyer. It mentioned OEM not REFURBISHED. So they did send me a new one OEM.
Finally I have decided to plug the hard drive through the back of the motherboard through one of the eSATA ports using an external power supply for the Hard Drive and a eSATA to SATA cable. and it still hangs up. I think you are right Krikkit it could very well be an incompatibility issue. How do I stand "as in rights" as a consumer with a product purchased that I am not able to use due to an incompatibility? This really baffles me. I was hoping to be able to at least use it as an external back up hard drive and buy another 753 to configure my system with 2 x HD753LJ RAID 0 striped Configuration
The problem is the motherboard. The p5k, as great as i am told it is, is rubbish. it doesn't like most brands of Hard drive. I tried so many different drives on a recent customer build, i just got fed up and sent it back.
