[all2ofme]

Anyone else had problems with the 1TB Samsung drives?

I bought a couple of the Samsung Spinpoint 1TB drives six(ish) months ago and they've both always made a clunky sound (clank, clank is probably my best attempt at describing it in letters ) on startup in my Mac Pro.

Because both of them do the same thing it didn't give me too much cause for concern, but one of them (my boot drive) started misbehaving recently and Diskwarrior's valiant - but failed - attempts led me to replacing it with a Seagate 7200.11 instead. They've been quiet otherwise, and their SMART status has always reassured me.

I bought them about a week apart, and from the same place, and I'm concerned now that I've got two drives from a bad batch. I'm inclined to move over to the Seagate in the meantime as the boot drive, as the other is an internal nightly mirror using SuperDuper and lower risk as a result.

Are there any other diagnostic tools that I could use to see if this other one is likely to fail too?

[tooki]

Well, having a selection of different brand disks does reduce your risk, but statistically speaking, how heavily a drive is used does not significantly affect its lifetime.

As for SMART, don't let it "reassure" you. All that a "clean" SMART report means is that none of the selected few parameters that it measures have exceeded some threshold the manufacturer set. As it happens, those thresholds are pretty high, but moreover, not nearly enough is tested. In a nutshell, if you see a bad SMART report, you KNOW without a doubt that the drive will die soon. But conversely, a clean bill of health from SMART is damned near meaningless. I've never had (me, or my clients) a hard drive fail and actually give a SMART warning first. They just up and died.

SMART Utility looks at the raw SMART measurements and uses its own, much lower, failure thresholds. I'd trust this utility more, but even so, if a drive doesn't measure a particular issue, it's a moot point.