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After acquiring Maxtor HDD, Seagate, as the largest manufacturer of HDD, however, doesn’t stop its steps to expand further and it gets now Samsung HDD at $1.375 billion in a cash-and-stock transaction. However we will still have some time to find a lot of Samsung technology based hard drives there in the market. This article is going to introduce to you the typical malfunctions of Samsung hdd and its diagnosis.

Samsung HDD typical malfuntions:

1, Bad sectors;
2, Firmware failure-corrupted SA modules;
3, Failure of reading or writing heads or commutator chip;
4, PCB damage;
5, Microprogram failure in ROM;
6, Spindle motor failure

Samsung PCB failures

To detect a PCB failure, you can use a donor PCB from another drive of the same family. However, this method sometimes fails to indentify a faulty board unambiguously. Rom firmware in Samsung drives contains adaptive information necessary to adjust the heads reading or writing the service area. VANGOPLUS, PANGO, VELOCE, PALO and MAGMA drives also perserve a heads map in ROM. However, if a HDD behaviour changes after the PCB replacement, it may mean that the native PCB is malfunctioning. Then you should solder the ROM chip from the native PCB of the drive in question to the donor PCB to make center that the former represents the cause of problems.

If a drive doesn’t spin up the spindle after power-up and remains busy, it may mean a serious corruption of the ROM firmware. When a mismatch of its checksum occurs. Invalid data in ROM may also prevent a drive from reporting ready.

Failure of reading or writing heads or commutator chip

You usually need to use some professional hdd repair tools to diagnose the patient drive. If the head zero or commutator read channel are malfunctioning, the drive will keep knocking at the start. data recovery from such kind of drive requires a replacement of its MHA or platters which may be easier in LOW-profile VANGOPLUS and PANGO drives. You will need to consider the head map and manufacturer during the procedure. For this problem, you may need to consider using HD HPE PRO in the clean room or clean bench to perform the head or platter swap.

Firmware failure-corrupted SA modules

This hdd failure can not be fixed as well by simply data recovery software and so far we may remind you of PC3000 and SalvationDATA HD Doctor for Samsung which may help you on this kind of problem.

Spindle motor failure

The motor may fail to spin up due to the motor seizure, coil break or a burnt-out HA13627 motor control chip on the PCB. In order to test the chip functionality you should replace the PCB with a donor one of the same family. If the error codes change after that and the motor spins up, it will tell that the chip has to be replaced.

Samsung HDD bad sectors

If a drive has a few bad sectors up to 50-100 per zone, you can try adding them to the defect lists but if more bad sectors, you may need to perform selfscan or zerofill but this actually affects the data. So you must make all the possible backup or image the patient drive first.

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