Samsung 1TB SpinPoint F3 faulty, now working, can I still RMA it?

[luke_c]

I have a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 as a storage drive, ever since I got it last year it's been incredibly loud, way louder than I'm sure it should be, and I'm sure it's on its last legs now.

Anyway, yesterday I was playing the Firefall beta, when the game crashed and my PC kept locking up, this continued for a few minutes until eventually my PC just froze completely, no BSOD or anything, it just froze.

I checked all my temps and they were all fine, I turned my PC off and back on and it kept happening, except this time my PC didn't freeze, after one of the lock-ups my HDD disappeared from My Computer.

When I restarted I was met with requiring a Chkdsk for the drive which showed all file record segments after about 50,000 or so unreadable, reading online this seems to mean imminent death for the drive. After about an hour or so I just turned off the check and rebooted as I knew it would take hours, skipping it, I done a test with SeaTools which it failed on the Short Drive Self Test with "6C9AC2A4

Serial number not detected, SeaTools did fail the drive" the HDD was still playing up and I couldn't transfer any files across without it freezing and again disappearing.

Next I booted into a gParted live CD and I did something to the HDD, it was something like scan and repair the drive on the main partition, which it completed in 4 seconds. I then booted back into Windows to find the hard drive seemingly working fine, except the extremely loud noises still when it's being read/write and it passed all SeaTools tests.

Can I still RMA the drive? I'm sure it's going to fail again and this is a temporary fix, I don't want to wait for it to start playing up again as when it kept locking up it corrupted my SSDs boot manager which took an awful long time for me to fix, I've been meaning to upgrade to a 2TB drive anyway and the sooner the better, I'm just sick of this hard drive's constant noise and it playing up, will they accept a RMA for it?

[PatrynXX]

Thats what I'm doing to a 1 TB rather reliable Hitachi. RMA'd it. guess I have to pay to ship it. :( But basically used Stellar Phoenix Windows Recovery on it. At some point windows found it again. but with almost 400 pending sectors. thats a problem. (using smartmontools then the GUI that goes with it) haven't had alot of luck with used spinpoints. Noisy? no. But the one particular chip tends to get so hot that it melts the board. This was back when Samsung still owned it. Like my Hitachi. Which is now by WD. Which so far the only plus is the motherboard is now pressure based instead of attached via a wire/cable. If your getting a short test fail, that will get RMA'd. unless it was a used drive. All of mine were from Lacie's at some point so I only went thru geeks to return mine. Will never touch another used hard drive from geeks again. They are all faulty.

[luke_c]

Thats what I'm doing to a 1 TB rather reliable Hitachi. RMA'd it. guess I have to pay to ship it. :( But basically used Stellar Phoenix Windows Recovery on it. At some point windows found it again. but with almost 400 pending sectors. thats a problem. (using smartmontools then the GUI that goes with it) haven't had alot of luck with used spinpoints. Noisy? no. But the one particular chip tends to get so hot that it melts the board. This was back when Samsung still owned it. Like my Hitachi. Which is now by WD. Which so far the only plus is the motherboard is now pressure based instead of attached via a wire/cable. If your getting a short test fail, that will get RMA'd. unless it was a used drive. All of mine were from Lacie's at some point so I only went thru geeks to return mine. Will never touch another used hard drive from geeks again. They are all faulty.

It WAS getting a short test fail, but after I used gParted it isn't anymore, that's why I'm not sure on RMA'ing it.

[Livin in a box]

I think you're better off doing. If you back everything up from it and send it in then you don't really have too much to lose to be honest and you never know, they could find a fault with it that you've not been able to replicate. As long as you explain yourself to them then I'm sure they'll let you send it in and they'll have a look and see why it has done what its done.