I recently purchased two of these drives and installing one in my media center PC was the biggest pain I have ever endured from any hard drive manufacturer. So it began around 6:00 p.m. last night, I stuck the samsung in the case and booted up. I checked the bios and the drive detected fine. I fired up windows went to my computer, no drive. This didn't hurt my feelings too bad as the drive didn't come with a disk so off off to the samsung website I went. I downloaded the utility, burned to disk and did a restart. Once the utility fired up I selected the "low level format" option as I did not see a quick format.


A stir fry dinner and a couple hands of uno later (11:45) the computer had finally counted to 100,000 (100% complete format). I figured I was in business for sure now and rebooted. Well, once again My computer did not display the drive. Tired and weary I set off searching for answers as to why I might be having this problem. First stop was Neweggs product review page for this drive. After reading a-lot of the reviews it became fully apparent that this drive has issues with nvidia sata controllers. The most prevalent suggestion said to turn the "enable command queuing" setting off in the bios. Now this is fine and has apparently worked for some but my ASUS A8N5X did not have this setting (it is possible my tired eyes neglected to see it but doubtfull). My ASUS mobo is a 939 socket AMD board that is showing it's age a little but has been trouble free and an all around great board. Certainly it never had any issues with any of the other hard drives I have used (maxtor, western digital, seagate).

I spent a lot of time making bios setting changes to no avail. I finally hit pay dirt when I saw a post recommending using the windows install disk to format it. I inserted my windows MCE 2005 disk one and started the install process, there was the elusive samsung. I started the install process like I was going to install windows but when the first part was done I removed the install disk and let the computer boot on the C: drive (western digital) windows installation. Windows started and finally the drive was visible in my computer. I selected the drive and did another format to remove any installation files it had on it and rebooted. I finally got an empty samsung (drive G:) to put some data on. So far it seems to work ok and is stable.

Here is the deal, there are plenty of players in the hard drive market. Now that this drive is up and running it is whisper quiet and it was a good deal if you measure by price per GB. However, in hind site if I was aware of the nvidia sata controller compatibility issues or the fact that I would waste 5+ hours of my life trying to get a hard drive working I would have spent $20 more and got a western digital that takes 5 minutes to install. Not to mention I have had great luck with western digital. I have to ask samsung a couple of questions.

1. Are you aware that nvidia sata controllers are a large market share? If so do you plan to remedy this issue? From what I have seen on your site you fail to acknowledge and provide support for this issue that a lot people are having.
2. Are you tired of RMA's on this drive yet? The average end consumer of this product will not jump through the hoops I did to get this drive to work. The "enable command queuing" bios setting is not a fix . Even if it's an available bios setting it could conflict with existing system performance. While tech savy people feel like that you should read 100 pages and fix the problem if you want it to work, I feel like consumers buy things with the hopes of it just working. It takes time to deal with a product that's flaky and to expect them to deal with it is flawed. It is the equivalent of selling a car and saying "well, you will need to take the cylinder heads off and replace the faulty gaskets but aside from that it's a great car". People want to get in and drive it, not spend time under the hood.
3. Do you plan on providing a genuine fix for this? I like to endorse newcomers to a market and encourage a competitive marketplace. If you are selling a flawed product I will even give you the ability to fix it after the fact and still sing praise for doing the right thing. Will you give me the reason to write an addendum to this article and say "hey, samsung has good support and good drives, buy them."? I hope so.


In short my conclusion on the SAMSUNG Spinpoint HD753LJ is this, it's a cheap drive that you could be very happy with if you're not using nvidia sata controllers in your machine. For now, If you are using nvida spend the extra 20$ on a western digital, seagate or maxtor and save yourself the trouble. As of now it is working for me and I have my fingers crossed hoping it stays that way. After reading all of the reviews I get the feeling that even though it is working now it could pancake one me, it has happened with others shortly after the same issues. It certainly was not worth the money I saved in relation to the problems I had installing it.

tags: , , ,