Samsung Spinpoint F4EG HD204UI 2TB compatibility?

[Dizzle77]

I have two of these drives in my 211j.
I bought them early December, so I definately need to patch them

My issue is that I have a macbook pro at home. I have access to a windows laptop though which I could use.
Will I be able to connect hard drives using usb to update them?

Any good online guides available for this process?

thanks

[xcopy]

I have two of these drives in my 211j.
I bought them early December, so I definately need to patch them

My issue is that I have a macbook pro at home. I have access to a windows laptop though which I could use.
Will I be able to connect hard drives using usb to update them?

No...

Any good online guides available for this process?

read this thread...

thanks

[scratch]

Post by mark » Tue Mar 15, 2011 12:24 am"
"The spin-up in the past error occurs because you have started up your Synology with
DSM 3.0 which does not include the spinup patch. Had you immediately installed DSM 3.1
then you would not have this error.

So for a DS211 can I check this is the correct procedure.
- Download latest DSM (DSM_DS211_1605.pat, Version: DSM 3.1-1605; Build Date: 2011/03/24)
- Press and hold reset button (with paper clip) for 4 secs, wait for beep. Then release reset and press again for 4 secs and then run update from PC.
- I assume I need to do all of this before inserting the 2 x 204UI hard drives (02/2011 manuf)
Is the DSM stored in eeprom on the synology or does it actually need a hard drive to be in there to install to?
Thanks.

[scratch]

*Update. I found I had to install one hard drive to be able to update to the new DSM3.1, then after that I installed the 2nd hard drive.
So far so good, think I need to do fdisk -lu to figure out the cluster size?

[Bitgod]

Sooo, lets say one of your drives in your 1511 decided to have an issue and DSM is telling you the drive is crashed, what's the standard procedure. Just swap drives and rebuild and RMA the "bad" drive, or are there some things to try before that?

[greenrhyno]

Just updated the DSM a few days ago and got the message about turning off the caching on the w HD204UI disks in our 211J Synology. I got the disks in November so they definitely have the old firmware unpatched. With respect to the DOS firmware update, we don't have any windows desktops, and the write speed is not an issue for us. I also read posts from a couple of people that messed up their raid setup by making a mistake in the firmware update process- in the order they pulled and reinserted the disks. It seems like a hassle and risk vs. just leaving the system as is and leaving the write cache off.

Our Synology does a nightly backup on my wife's windows computer with data replicator, an hourly time machine backup on my mac, and plays music from a USB speaker and streams to our iphones. The disks and Synology have always performed flawlessly for us, and the setup is a RAID 1 with the 2 2TB disks, of which we use less than 1TB currently. We don't do any direct downloads, torrents or anything to the synology, so on average it only writes maybe a hundred MB a day with what has changed on our computers.

I think I will just leave the disks in with the disk caching turned off. Write speeds seem fine for our needs and it appears from my research the problem occurs with caching turned on. We have online and off site backups also, so if both disks were to fail at once we would still have data other places.

Just wanted to see if anyone on here thinks that just leaving write cache off in our situation is not an acceptable solution an why. Also was curious if anyone else has just decided to leave the write cache off.

[Townie]

Write cache gives no real benefit in the situation like you're referring to, "write once read many" In fact, I would consider write cache disabled to be the correct setting, any performance gains are negligible and without battery backup data could be lost.

If you're access to the NAS is more interactive, eg. torrents, webdav, application server etc. then there would be a bigger performance hit. Still small but with lots of users it could be noticeable.

In your situation I'd leave it off. The risk of data corruption was only present with write cache enabled according to the makers of smartmontools.

NB. I'm unsure whether disabling write cache in the control panel disables write cache directly on the disks or just the filesystem. Ideally it would disable the disks write cache, if it only disables write cache on the filesystem then it's not really disabling the write cache, if that makes sense.

Oh, and PS. You don't need a Windows machine to update the firmware. Anything with a SATA port that boots from CD/floppy drive/USB can achieve the update.

[greenrhyno]

@Townie- Thanks for the insight!

We are all laptops here, but maybe I could track down someone with SATA or just go the USB enclosure route that I saw posted on here. For now though I think I'll just leave it be. I'll post on here if we ever run into problems, but hopefully just leaving the write cache off will take care of the problem for us.

Our DS211j with two HD204UI has worked flawlessly since we got it in November, and since the DSM update disabled write cache, it still seems to be working fine.

[pertussis]

Hello to all Synology product users. I just bought my first ever NAS, Synology DS211j to be precise, and decided it would be a good idea to get a duo of the 2TB Samsung drives to go with it. Unfortunately one did not take the time to see the list of recommended HDDs and thus was not aware of the firmware issue and the need to update to DSM 3.1 before installing drives. I enthusiastically popped the drives in and went on with Synology assistant for Mac. I did not use the DSM that came with the disk but instead took the time to downloaded the latest build (DSM_DS211j_1613.pat) from Synology page. After installing that build I started building RAID0 (which for some reason did the disk check twice ). I stumbled upon this topic only afterwards and are now wondering whether I managed to F it up by having not updated drives inside the NAS during DSM 3.1 installation. The serial numbers for the drives are S2H7J9DZC00013 and S2H7J9DZC00018 (as reported by DSM).

[Townie]

According to http://www.samsunghddvalue.com/WebRMA/W ... ecker.aspx the warranty expires March 2014, with a 3 year warranty one could reasonably assume the manufacturing date to be around Jan/Feb 2011 which would mean they already have the updated firmware on them. This concurs with the serial No's on Synology compatibility list warning which shows xxxxxxxZBxxxxx but not yours which are xxxxxxxZCxxxxx.

I think it's reasonable to assume that you're ok.

[pertussis]

I never got any kind of notification from DSM about the firmware or caching, but then again the unit shipped without factory installed version of DSM. Maybe the new version queries the serial number of the drives to see if they are among the ones affected by the firmware issue. Why should one upgrade DSM 3.1 before installing HD204UI drives?

Any idea if disk check is conducted on each of the drives separately during RAID build. My DS211j equipped with two disks decided to go from 0 to 100% twice, which took around 20 hours. Would DS411j then take 40 hours for the same procedure assuming one were to use 4 drives?

P.S. Love my DS211j, great UI and nice speeds. Coupled with D-Link DIR 655 router I manage to get around 10MB/s on my MacBook Pro over WLAN. So far it seems to be enough for GoPro HD video and 1080p mkv-files.

[Camster]

Hi,

Just found out about this issue and need help!!

As part of my Uni course I need to handle/manipulate large amounts of storage. Rather than delete what seemed to not be required, I decided to save all data should I need to return to it at a later date. Therefore, I thought it was good to buy two HD204UI drives.

These are now both fully installed and look to be working fine, though I have no data on them at present, my previous (and now full) drives were used with no issues. As I was adding more to my humble PC I thought it best to check temperatures using smart before transferring the data.

At this point I found out the drives had been blocked due to a "known issue". After loads of reading I've stumbled onto this forum.

I understand most of the firmware flashing but not sure if I'm ready to go for it straight away.

My questions:

The drives were only bought less than one month ago, sometime in June. They were both bought from ebuyer online. If I get the drives out and check for the manufacture date, is it correct that I do not need to firmware flash these if the date is after 12.2010? Seeing as I bought them in June 2011 is it likely that the date is after 12.2010? What do I do if there is no date, as posted by others above?

I guess the only thing to do is to get them out and check...

My smart control shows all drives' "Bus" as being raid. Is this correct? Does changing this to IDE solve the problem?

What about disabling write caching? Will this completely remove the issue? From what I've read all that does is supposedly slow down transfer times but in reality (reading a post somewhere) the transfer time didn't change much - I can live with this if it fully solves the issue, though I understand it is not as permanent as firmware flashing.

I remember having several "boot from..." issues before when a friend was helping to improve/change the PC before. He doesn't live here now so I'm not keen on running into the same problems without his help, hence looking to avoid booting from USB if possible. Could maybe try the CD boot if absolutely necessary, though need a CD

Also, I didn't quite fully understand why drives "manufactured before 10.2010 are junk", can these not be flashed as well?

My first port of call will be to get the drives back out and to check the dates but depending on the date I definitely do not know what I'm supposed to do. Not sure if this means they will need to be flashed, they will not need to be flashed or if it is advisable to just flash them anyway as a precaution.

Has it been confirmed yet that this F4EG flash works 100% and is 100% permanent?

It's bed time for me now so I'll get the drives out asap and will be back on to check advice

Any help is much appreciated. I may be running a fairly basic system but the data is important and due to running several drives I definitely want to use smart monitoring to keep an eye on temperatures just in case. I can follow step by step instructions but was really expecting a simple plug and play with these drives, so right now I'm not sure what my best course of action is.

Thanks,
Cammy

[kjkunk]

Hi Camster,

Check the serial numbers on the drives to know for sure if you have an early drive that needs a patch. I expect it to be from a later date since you bought it in June. So I won't answer all your questions becuase it depends on the first answer if you need those answered. Let's hope so.
(source: synology site, or this thread)

The error on the drives could not be reproduced with the patch. (source: read it somewhere, check this entire thread)

[xcopy]

As someone that had lots of trouble with these drives, I now think that the majority of problems were with external enclosures in my case. I reluctantly installed two of these into one of my DS211 boxes and though I don't use that particular device much, it seems to have been working reasonably well for 2 months now.

I still maintain that these drives are not my first choice, but if it's all you have, then they should be fine in your NAS. I would NOT use an older drive, either patched or unpatched, though that's just my preference. I consider these to be the weakest link in my 20TB of storage...

[Camster]

Hi Camster,

Check the serial numbers on the drives to know for sure if you have an early drive that needs a patch. I expect it to be from a later date since you bought it in June. So I won't answer all your questions becuase it depends on the first answer if you need those answered. Let's hope so.
(source: synology site, or this thread)

The error on the drives could not be reproduced with the patch. (source: read it somewhere, check this entire thread)

Thanks for the reply. I've had a busy day so haven't got the drives out yet - will get them out when I'm back and will reply with the serial numbers.

Thanks,
Cammy