Hard Drive Firmware Upgrade. The Samsung HD204UI itself had a firmware upgrade due to a data corruption bug that could occur if an ATA Identify command was received during a write operation and I remember applying it to both drives. Firmware patch/update for certain Samsung internal drives including HD204UI.
Using smartctl with Samsung F4 EcoGreen drives may result in data loss Summary. WARNING: Do not use smartmontools with Samsung HD155UI and HD204UI drives unless the firmware patch is already installed. Samsung provides separate patches for and for. This warning also applies to other tools which use IDENTIFY DEVICE to obtain drive information.
The problem is not SMART related. The problem could (at least) also be reproduced with (on Linux and ) and with SeaTools for Windows.
THE SAMSUNG FIRMWARE PATCH DOES NOT CHANGE THE FIRMWARE VERSION NUMBER (Believe it or not!). Update: According to Samsung Support, HD204UI drives manufactured December 2010 or later include the firmware patch (see ).
Update: Samsung HDD support info is now included in the. Smartctl 5.39.X and 5.40 print a if the user has done a after 2010-11-24. The warning will also be printed when the patch is already installed!
History 2010-11-24: We received a problem report from German c't magazine. Here are the details as reported by c't and (updated 2010-11-30):. Affected disk: SAMSUNG SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen 2TB Device Model: SAMSUNG HD204UI Firmware Version: 1AQ10001.
Problem: If the system writes to this disk and smartctl -a (5.40) is used at the same time, write errors are reported and bad blocks appear on the disk. This was reported by a reader and could be reproduced in c't magazine lab on the following system: Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Core i3-560 Intel H55 chipset SATA-AHCI-Driver: Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 9.6. It could also be reproduced under Linux (Fedora 14) if AHCI is enabled and the following commands are run in parallel: # badblocks -svw -b 4096 /dev/sdd 4000000 # smartctl -a /dev/sdd. It could not be reproduced if the Intel H55 chipset is set to IDE mode.
It could also be reproduced on another system with an AMD chipset under Windows and drivers msahci.sys or amdsata.sys. It could not be reproduced on the same AMD system and amdsata.sys driver with the following other disks: SAMSUNG HD322GJ (F4) SAMSUNG HD103SJ (F3) SAMSUNG HD153WI (F3 EcoGreen) SAMSUNG HD642JJ (F1) SAMSUNG SP2504C (P120) WDC WD6400AAKS WDC WD10EADS. It could also be reproduced on an system with Intel P45 chipset. It could also be reproduced on an AMD based system with NVIDIA nForce 520 chipset.
![Samsung Hdd Firmware Update Hd204ui Samsung Hdd Firmware Update Hd204ui](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125499222/227100982.jpg)
It could also be reproduced if only smartctl -i is used. This command sends only one ATA command to the disk: IDENTIFY DEVICE.
No SMART functionality is used then. It could also be reproduced with hdparm -I on Linux. It could also be reproduced with Seagate SeaTools for Windows. 2010-11-24: Drive database file for smartmontools and is updated. A warning is printed if such a drive is detected. Please note that it might be too late then because the IDENTIFY DEVICE command is the actual problem.
2010-11-26: The info is published on (German) (updated 2010-11-30, ). 2010-11-30: We could reproduce the problem, see. 2010-12-02: Samsung confirmed the problem and provided a beta version of the firmware patch. 2010-12-09: Samsung released a. 2010-12-13: Samsung released a.
How to reproduce Tested on an Intel based system with P35 chipset under Linux ( 2010.04 Live CD) with NCQ and disk write cache enabled. # uname -a Linux grml.somewhere 2.6.33-grml #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Apr 2 10:16:25 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux # smartctl -i -q noserial /dev/sda smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 i686-pc-linux-gnu (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce AllenSTART OF INFORMATION SECTION Device Model: SAMSUNG HD204UI Firmware Version: 1AQ10001 User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes.