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If you have a P5K Premium board and think about using a Samsung HD501lj drive..
hello,
Sharing something I learned this week. I'm not trying to bas any manufacturer. Just trying to save others some trouble I experienced and see if anyone tried this too.
I ordered and built 2 new computers for my wife and I. Both had the Asus p5K Premium boards with q6600 procs. Based on a review on anandtech, I decided to try the Samsung SPinpoint T series HD501lj drives. The review stated good speed and low noise ad heat.
Once built, I ran into an immediate problem installing vista. It would see the drive, but could not write to it or format it. I could create a partition, but could get no further. It would sit there forever but never advance.
I tried both drives in both machines. Same results. New cables. All sata port combinations I could come up with. Same problem. Put the drive into an old P4 machine and could see and format it. 500mb took about 2 hours to format. I put it back in the quad core new machines and vista saw it and tried to write to it. It eventually gave an error saying it could not write to the drive. I was thinking I had the SATA 2 problem some people hit on the p5k deluxe baords. I checked the web and see some people having some SATA issues and think maybe its a SATA 2 compatability issue. I will try a new drive.
I drove to the store and picked up a Maxtor SATA 2 drive (rebadged Seagate actually). Popped it in one of the machines and it worked fine. Fast install actually. Quiet and fast.
Called Samsung after looking all over their website for a firmware flash. Short version of long call. They escalated me to their top tier support and they eventually confirmed that it looks like they have a compatability problem with that motherboard and will need to flash their drive eventually to solve it. RMA in process to newegg for me. I went back to the store and got another Maxtor drive and have both machines up and running.
Just sharing the problem in case anyone else goes this route.
If anyone has thin MB and drive combination working, I'd love to know. Otherwise, I hope I am saving someone a lot of trouble. I was lucky enough to have 2 exact machines and drives to test with. That helped when dealing with product support.
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