Despite all SMART values being way above thresholds my internal 500 GB Samsung was giving up on me which I realized when I suddenly couldn’t copy over a file to my external Samsung Spinpoint F DT USB backup disc. A deep scan with Samsung’s ES Tool revealed several defective LBAs so I cloned the entire disc to said external to swap them. When I booted up my machine the new disc wasn’t detected by my board’s VIA 8237 RAID controller revealing the flaw I’d overlooked so far:
SATA interface speed cannot be switched to 1.5 Gb/s!
Apart from SATA’s touted backwards and forwards compatibility which should ensure operating a 3.0 drive on a 1.5 connector the manual on Samsung’s product page explicitely mentions a SATA 1.5 Gb/s Speed Limit Jumper setting to avoid speed negotiation issues on older motherboards. The manual however depicts 8 jumper pins whereas the HD753LJ has only 4 (!) none combination of which does any good.
So I tried both patch downloads mentioned in the FAQ to set the speed via software on a friend’s PC whose motherboard can stomach 3.0 devices attached to it. Curiously enough both tools do not show the current setting so to verify patch results you gotta boot ES Tool again. 3 boot CDs, how’s that for convience?
Of course applying the patches did not work as confirmed by Samsung support the next day. I’d tried to contact them by mail but their German support form did not list my drive model so I had to call the hotline which failed to call me back. When I called again the next day the droid on the phone had no explanation on why manual and support form where out of date nor what the 4 jumper pins are supposedly used for (since they are not used for master/slave or 32 GB clip settings anymore).
Samsung – what’s the (Spin)point?
Update, August 6th
I’ve just read on a german forum that only after using the second tool on Samsung’s FAQ page ES-Tool 2.11 would get a new option ‘Set Max UDMA’ which at last would allow adjusting interface speed (‘process’ ). Can anyone please confirm that with a comment. I’ve already sold my Samsung and got a WD but I’d really like to know if Samsung tried to fix this flaw.
Update, November 4th
Since I’d sold my drive to a friend I was able to test it again yesterday at his computer and now it worked for me too! I was able to switch SATA speed setting by doing it as Ken Cowin suggested: set to 3.0 GB in SSpeed instead of 1.5! It appears whoever coded the tool accidentally labeled the routines the wrong way cause after using SSpeed I could verify (and even change) speed with ES Tools and option ‘Set Max UDMA’.
Update, June 6th 2010
As mentioned in the comments apparently the current version of ESTool does the job just fine. Can’t test it myself cause I’ve switched to WD Green in the meantime.
Tech Flaws 
Hi again. Btw, this either is a stupid newb question to which everyone but myself already knows the answer to, or it should have been raised and answered a long time ago. The question is, is there any performance loss from switching the SATA II interface on the HD down to SATA I interface to get it to work with VIA?? If not, then why did they bother making the SATA II standard if it’s not any better? If there is a performance loss, exactly what am I losing?
Thanks!
You tell us:
SATA 1.0 (SATA 1.5Gb/s) ≅ 143.05 MiB/s
SATA 2.0 (SATA 3 Gb/s) ≅ 286.10 MiB/s)
How fast are your harddrives?
My HD is the Samsung F3 Spinpoint 1TB model HD103SJ. According to HD Tune benchmark, the max transfer rate I had was 124 MB/s:
This is actually the exact same as the max write speed achieved in this review:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/06/samsung-spinpoint-f3-1tb-review/3
So I guess that settles that: I can conclude there’s no performance lost in that department. Right? But why is the burst speed so different?? That review reports 258.9 MB/s whereas I got 107 …
AFAIK this burst speed stems from your hard drive’s cache to the computer’s RAM. SATA’s interface speed is too fast for current hard drives (except SSDs) so switching to 1.5 Gb/s is no problem. Especially considering you’d otherwise be unable to use this drive on your current motherboard but had to buy a new one.
Weird btw, that I can’t reply to your comment but only to my own…
Thank you so so much, stumbled across this site after trying many a suggestion to get my samsung f2 working with my old asus k8v-x board with the vt8237 chipset. and happy to say i got the drive working, at last.
thanks to all again esp mr cowin :)
Well I admit I got a bit lazy/impatient and didn’t want to record what it said. But it was just some useless stuff. I think part of it said copyright such-and-such year(s). I got the impression it was like that info programs sometimes print at the end after they stop executing like written by so-and-so copyrighted such-and-such year, bla bla bla.
And yes, of course I did it from booting off the boot disk. I followed Ken Cowin’s instructions.
But in any case, immediately after that attempt failed (and after I posted the posts below) I tried the other method, using ESTOOL, as suggested by spodosaurus. It’s up to version 3.00g now on Samsung’s website, so that’s the one I used. And it worked! I installed winxp on it and have been running diagnostics on the drive, using the computer/mobo which did not detect it before. So it seems like Ken Cowin’s method is no longer necessary anyway. Using ESTOOL is a little simpler, more straightforward. And it worked for both me and spodosaurus. And it has the settings correct, not backward like in SSpeed.
I’m thinking that perhaps the reason SSpeed wasn’t working was because my HDD was having issues? I was getting the infamous “a disk read error occurred. Press ctrl alt del to restart” problem.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/250364-32-solution-disk-read-error-occurred
I was getting the error on both my friend’s computer, which I used to do this procedure, and on mine at home after it was able to actually detect it.
Well, I’m glad it worked out and Samsung apparently has gotten it finally right.
Ok I finally got around to doing the Ken Cowin method. Why is it not doing anything?? I did everything according to the steps. After I type in “run” after I’m inside the sspeed directory, it spits out some text, sits there for a while, and then *nothing comes up on screen*! It just goes back to the same prompt: “A:\SSPEED>”. And that’s it. I never got any screen with options to come up. What’s going on??
P.S. Correction, actually. When I said nothing comes up on screen, it actually did spit out one more line of text before finishing and going back to the same DOS prompt. Anyway, no screen with options came up.
Right, and what does that line say? You did run the tool from a boot disk or boot cd and not from inside Windows, right?
When I boot from this disk/cd and type ‘run’, I can select 1. or 2. and choose the latter, setting to 3.0 GB/s which actually sets to 1.5 which I can verify immediately after by firing up ESTool (from another disk or cd) under SET MAX UDMA MODE > Display current mode which is set to Mode 1 (SATA 150).
Pingback: Samsung HD753LJ – how to limit SATA mode?
Bruce Schneier? Can’t be too difficult to see, I’m simply translating some of his pieces, or is it?
Ok I’m really confused. If you go to the FAQ page,
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=126&orderNum=2
are you saying I should NOT use any of those patches?
Are you saying that instead I should only use ES Tool — which is NOT on that page — but can instead be found here:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/ES_Tool.html
?
Finally, why are there 2 ES Tools? The samsung website still does not make any sense and confuses the hell out of me.
Please help me out lol… thanks!
By doing it as Ken Cowin suggested: “set to 3.0 GB in SSpeed instead of 1.5!” Also, why should I know why Samsung has 2 ES Tools?
Oh I see it now… oops, sorry, I didn’t realize at first there were more comments that needed to be exposed. Was wondering who Ken Cowin was in your main post.
Yo i got the same prob with my Samsung HD753LJ SATA HDD 750 GB but 2 things are really odd.1st in the bios it only shows 131gb but its a 750gb i got it off a friend that told me he set it down so it could work on his old pc.How can i get the 750gb back? iv tried switching it a couple of times from 1.5 to 3.0 and back but still kinda screws me in HSTools i cant set the umda it hangs or kicks me back out 2 dos.Otherwise the harddrive works fine,drag n drop install everything just 131gb im so frustrated.I think once as i tried 2 erase the drive it said somthing bout SA out of stacks and a service code=AJ36 can anybody help or has whitnessed the same?
AFAIK drive size is independent of SATA speed setting. Have you checked Samsung’s ES Tool for a drive size setting? Checked in another friend’s PC that can handle larger sizes what your drive shows up as there? If there’s no BIOS update for your mainboard it just won’t detect more than that, I’m afraid.
If you can’t get your BIOS to recognize your HDD, you could try asking for help at http://www.wimsbios.com/forum/my-hard-drive-isn-t-recognized-f26.html, maybe there is a patched BIOS available.
Wim
Thank’s a lot, the procedure works really fine.
I had the same issue with a HD502HI and VIA8237 controller. Updating the BIOS and so on was without any effect. After following your instruction the drive was detected by the controller and is running well.
I was in contact with Samsung support for two times cause of this problem, -> save your time and let them sleep.
D’oh! Why don’t you try yourself? Obviously the tool’s functions has mixed up labels. So 1.5 -> 3.0 is 3.0 -> 1.5 and the other way round. If you set it now to 1.5 it should be 3.0 and not work in a board that supports only 1.5.
shure but will it really switch to 3.0 since it did not when I used it the first time it actually switched to 1.5 even when selecting 1.5 -> 3.0
On a board that can handle 3.0 you can of course switch back to the higher speed with the same tools.
WOW!!!!
This really worked out! I selected the WRONG 1.5 -> 3.0 and now my Spinpoint F1 320 Gb works on my Asrock K7VT4A Pro.
But what if I upgrade to SataII board will the drive be stuck @ 1.5. I´m asking because doing 1.5 – 3.0 again might not work since it switched my drive from 3.0 to 1.5. Or is it a kind of “toggle” Mode?
Nice this one worked for you. But on my board the drive would not even show up in the BIOS.
OK, after having the same problem as you guys, i followed all instructions i found on the problem. I am using an older foxconn motherboard 945G series. I followed Kens tutorial at first with no success, not saying it was wrong, but it didn’t work for me. I struggled for a week before i decided to buy an external enclosure for it to run through USB, as another site had suggested. Still no success in the caddy. By now my head is spinning, so i thought the drive was faulted, so i made a return request on Ebuyer, and had to phone them. Boy am i pleased i did. The nice tech chap ran me through some questions and i explained it all. It shows up in bios, and when windows boots it installs the device driver, but no drive appears. So he said, click start, go to computer and right click and press manage, this opens up a drive manager, in there you should see the hard drive, right click on the drive which should be unallocated space and format, simple as that. If you can’t format, restart your system and follow the steps again, that’s how i did it. Apparently this drive has an issue with older chipsets where the drive installs but does not initialise. That’s all it was for me, so maybe anyone out there who is still having problems can combine this with kens tutorial and hopefully you will sort it out. Thanks for all the info, helpful or not.