Computers have shown themselves to be hideously over complex yet again. I bought a Samsung Spinpoint F1 750GB SATA-300 hard drive (hd753lj). It failed. So, I got it returned, got another and then I tried to plug it into one of my media server computer's VIA VT6420 chipset SATA-150 headers, but it didn't work. The drive was fine, the cables were fine and the motherboard was fine, but it didn't all work together.
Turns out, the VT6420 doesn't support SATA-300. The drive is supposed to support auto-negotiation, but apparently that is "incompatible" with certain chipsets. It seems the VT6420 is one of them.
Samsung have a website, but it's written in some sort of molested form of English.
My mobility is very big, thanks for asking.
After hours of code cracking and deciphering, I worked out that they had some software you could download that should flash the hard drive to run in SATA-150 mode. I downloaded it, extracted it, burned it to a disk, booted said disk, ran the program, but it didn't detect my hard drive, and didn't flash it.
There's something on their page about jumpers but I haven't managed to work out what it means:
Can't things just work? Couldn't Samsung have done whatever everyone else does and provided a jumper to force the drive to negotiate SATA-150 rather than a silly software flash that doesn't work on all motherboard and/or drives.
Edit (follow up): A lot of people seem to be getting to this page from Google, searching for answers to their Samsung/VIA woes. I managed to get my system working eventually, but it cost me a little bit of time and money. If you buy a cheap ~£10 PCI card based on the Via VT6421A chipset, the drive should be detected, and should work! But there's a catch. You need to be extremely careful what card you buy, as you can't boot your computer from most of them.
If, like me, you accidentally bought a non-bootable card, you could try to flash your BIOS (see note) to boot from them, but I couldn't work out how. Instead, I tried to boot from a cheap IDE drive plugged into the onboard controller, which worked initially, but the system kept crashing. Turns out that when using both chipsets together, lots of people run into incompatibility issues. I just disabled the onboard chipset entirely. Given that I run Linux, I managed to install it so that the bootable parts were stored on a USB pen drive and now I boot from that, while having the remainder of my system stored on the SATA drive. As far as I know, you can do similar things than Windows, but it might take some effort to make it work properly.
As always, with computers, your mileage may vary and I'm not responsible for broken computers, wasted time or wasted money. :)
Note: The link is supposedly for vt6410 chips, but I read on the net that the tip works for vt6421a if you do it right. I never managed to make it work, so I can't help with that. Sorry.
There's something on their page about jumpers but I haven't managed to work out what it means:
It seems to be saying some drives aren't compatible, but hasn't told me which ones, and I couldn't find any information about the "jumper method" in the patch.
1. Patch File to be offered by Samsung electronics can change HDD's transmission mode 3.0Gbps to 1.5 Gbps compulsory.
2. Some models that are impossible to adjust the mode by the patch file can be controled to change the jumper pin.
- Target model : HD161JJ
**If you execute the patch file, you can see the Jumper method for the models which can not be adjusted by the patch file.
Can't things just work? Couldn't Samsung have done whatever everyone else does and provided a jumper to force the drive to negotiate SATA-150 rather than a silly software flash that doesn't work on all motherboard and/or drives.
Edit (follow up): A lot of people seem to be getting to this page from Google, searching for answers to their Samsung/VIA woes. I managed to get my system working eventually, but it cost me a little bit of time and money. If you buy a cheap ~£10 PCI card based on the Via VT6421A chipset, the drive should be detected, and should work! But there's a catch. You need to be extremely careful what card you buy, as you can't boot your computer from most of them.
If, like me, you accidentally bought a non-bootable card, you could try to flash your BIOS (see note) to boot from them, but I couldn't work out how. Instead, I tried to boot from a cheap IDE drive plugged into the onboard controller, which worked initially, but the system kept crashing. Turns out that when using both chipsets together, lots of people run into incompatibility issues. I just disabled the onboard chipset entirely. Given that I run Linux, I managed to install it so that the bootable parts were stored on a USB pen drive and now I boot from that, while having the remainder of my system stored on the SATA drive. As far as I know, you can do similar things than Windows, but it might take some effort to make it work properly.
As always, with computers, your mileage may vary and I'm not responsible for broken computers, wasted time or wasted money. :)
Note: The link is supposedly for vt6410 chips, but I read on the net that the tip works for vt6421a if you do it right. I never managed to make it work, so I can't help with that. Sorry.
3 comments:
I use the exact same setup as you do, and I've got some additional info.
If you could have used the tool found in the samsung faq you would have found it not to work... at least at first. Two options are presented: 150 to 300, or 300 to 150. Unfortunalty they are interchanged with each other so 150 to 300 actually means 300 to 150. Doh! Found out by mistake.
By the way: tried both jumper positions without success. No idea what they do, didn't seem to harm my drives thou.
About the "not finding disk problem": I had to put the disk in another machine to "patch" it.
Excellent site!
pdaaccessories.com/Samsung-cellphone-accessories.asp
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