Samsung 2TB drive not detected

[Rod Speed]

That doesn't sound like something I can repair.

Its possible that the contacts between the head cable
and the logic card have corroded, but unlikely.

 

[Rod Speed]

This PC stays on 24/7, only powering down
or rebooting when absolutely necessary.

Yeah, me too.

In addition to disabling drive spin down in Windows' power profile,

Yeah, me too.

I remember executing a command to disable spin down in general back
when I was upgrading the drive firmware. These drives are already very
low power at idle, so spin down isn't that important, and besides, this
PC is a network file server and I don't like the access delay while
waiting
for a drive to spin up, so I disabled the feature.

I guess what I don't know is whether very long periods of uptime are
harder on a drive than allowing it to spin down in between accesses.

No it isnt. My identical drives are all run like that and none have failed
at all.

I would have thought that allowing it to
run, albeit at idle, would be easier on it.

Yes it is.

That's just plain wrong with the Samsung drives.

...

I probably haven't been paying attention because I wasn't
aware that green drives have a tendency to fail early.

They don't with Samsung green drives.

 

[Mark Perkins]

Yeah, me too.


Yeah, me too.



No it isnt. My identical drives are all run like that and none have failed
at all.


Yes it is.


That's just plain wrong with the Samsung drives.



They don't with Samsung green drives.

Thanks for that confirmation.

 

[Mark Perkins]

Its possible that the contacts between the head cable
and the logic card have corroded, but unlikely.

They actually didn't look pristine to me when I had the card removed. A few
had the silvery 'new shine' on them, but a few others had a black ring (not
black as in burned or pitted, but black as in possible corrosion?), and
still others looked a copper color in their centers, as you'd expect from
rubbing or contact.

It can't hurt at this stage, so I'll lightly take an eraser to the area and
see if it cleans up and makes a difference.

 

[Mark Perkins]

They actually didn't look pristine to me when I had the card removed. A few
had the silvery 'new shine' on them, but a few others had a black ring (not
black as in burned or pitted, but black as in possible corrosion?), and
still others looked a copper color in their centers, as you'd expect from
rubbing or contact.

It can't hurt at this stage, so I'll lightly take an eraser to the area and
see if it cleans up and makes a difference.

Just to close the loop, I never did get around to trying the eraser trick.
Instead, I temp-installed the problem drive into an external enclosure where
it was detected, but the entire drive showed as Unallocated. I downloaded
and ran an open source program called Test Disk. Within a few seconds it had
found the damaged partition and repaired it. All of my data was immediately
accessible and has since been copied off, although that drive appears to be
working fine again. It'll have to regain my full trust, of course.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the thread. All's well that ends well.

 

[miso]

On 11/20/2013 1:19 PM, Mark Perkins wrote:

Oh, I don't know about trusting it again.

I'm presuming the external enclosure has a usb to sata? So that gets
around the bios? A good trick to know.

 

[Mark Perkins]

On 11/20/2013 1:19 PM, Mark Perkins wrote:

Oh, I don't know about trusting it again.

I'm presuming the external enclosure has a usb to sata? So that gets
around the bios? A good trick to know.

Right, USB to SATA and also eSATA to SATA. I tried both, sort of by
accident. I tried USB first, but eSATA is much faster so I switched over.

 

[Rod Speed]

Just to close the loop, I never did get around to trying the eraser trick.
Instead, I temp-installed the problem drive into an external enclosure
where it was detected, but the entire drive showed as Unallocated.

That may well have been because you swapped the logic card.

I downloaded and ran an open source program called Test Disk. Within a
few seconds it had found the damaged partition and repaired it. All of my
data was immediately accessible and has since been copied off, although
that
drive appears to be working fine again. It'll have to regain my full
trust, of course.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the thread. All's well that ends
well.

Thanks for the washup, too rare IMO.

 

[miso]

Right, USB to SATA and also eSATA to SATA. I tried both, sort of by
accident. I tried USB first, but eSATA is much faster so I switched over.

How does estata differ from just a sata port?

 

[Mark Perkins]

How does estata differ from just a sata port?

There are multiple minor differences, but the biggest to me is that eSATA
means external connectivity, while SATA implies internal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esata#eSATA

For example, on my external drive case, the rear of the case has USB and
eSATA for data connectivity. Inside the case there's a SATA connector into
which a hard drive gets plugged. On my PC, the rear panel has an eSATA
connector while the motherboard (internal to the PC) has 7 SATA connectors.