- Aug 24, 2009
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I'd welcome any advice, thoughts, confirmation, etc. for this problem:
I bought some new Samsung 830 SSDs for use as boot drives in new x79 windows 7 x64 pcs with UEFI bioses, so I had to partition them as GPT. (windows requires GPT partitioning for booting when you have a UEFI BIOS.)
I then discovered that the backup GPT partition area was being corrupted every few minutes by random information.
This is the reply I received from Samsung:
Dear Customer,
It is recommended that the unit be placed in an MBR format as the unit was made to work in a MBR. The cause of the corruption is for this very reason. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Thank you.
I wonder if this happens to any SSD with a GPT format, because of SSD use of unallocated space for "overprovisioning" purposes. The last few sectors of the drive, where the GPT backup partition header and table are, are unallocated space.
I ran the gpt fdisk utility to discover the corruption, but other utilities also discover it, such as mbrwizard. I inspected the last sectors and saw random data being written over the backup GPT partition information. I also confirmed this behavior with the author of the gpt fdisk utility. (it could be the cause is the Intel RSTe drivers instead.)
Here are the links to the windows utilities that confirm ongoing corruption:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/
http://firesage.com/mbrwizard.php
The command by the way to check with gpt fdisk is simply:
gdisk -l 0:
and with mbrwizard it is:
mbrwiz /list /disk=0
In both cases replace the zero with zero, one, two, etc. depending on the configuration of your GPT SSD hard drive. Typically a boot drive will be zero or one. If anyone has tried this on a Samsung 830 ssd, that would be particularly helpful.
Thanks.
I bought some new Samsung 830 SSDs for use as boot drives in new x79 windows 7 x64 pcs with UEFI bioses, so I had to partition them as GPT. (windows requires GPT partitioning for booting when you have a UEFI BIOS.)
I then discovered that the backup GPT partition area was being corrupted every few minutes by random information.
This is the reply I received from Samsung:
Dear Customer,
It is recommended that the unit be placed in an MBR format as the unit was made to work in a MBR. The cause of the corruption is for this very reason. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Thank you.
I wonder if this happens to any SSD with a GPT format, because of SSD use of unallocated space for "overprovisioning" purposes. The last few sectors of the drive, where the GPT backup partition header and table are, are unallocated space.
I ran the gpt fdisk utility to discover the corruption, but other utilities also discover it, such as mbrwizard. I inspected the last sectors and saw random data being written over the backup GPT partition information. I also confirmed this behavior with the author of the gpt fdisk utility. (it could be the cause is the Intel RSTe drivers instead.)
Here are the links to the windows utilities that confirm ongoing corruption:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/
http://firesage.com/mbrwizard.php
The command by the way to check with gpt fdisk is simply:
gdisk -l 0:
and with mbrwizard it is:
mbrwiz /list /disk=0
In both cases replace the zero with zero, one, two, etc. depending on the configuration of your GPT SSD hard drive. Typically a boot drive will be zero or one. If anyone has tried this on a Samsung 830 ssd, that would be particularly helpful.
Thanks.
Last edited: