I just ran across a reference to a problem with this drive which is favored around here. Apparently if a particular SMART command is issued during a write, the write fails and the block is marked as bad. Samsung has issued a firmware update to fix this, but if you don't know about it, you'll not know to apply the fix. Further, the fix does not update the firmware version so it is not possible to determine if the fix has been applied to new drives. (Props to Samsung on that aspect. 
)
I did find one oblique reference to this problem in the following post:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265364-32-samsung-204ui-smart
There is further info at http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks
I just want to help get the word out because I don't think this is a well known issue.
Today's PSA.
Edit: this is one reason why I match drives from different manufacturers when I build a RAID. I have one of these and it is mirrored with a Seagate ST32000542AS
)I did find one oblique reference to this problem in the following post:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265364-32-samsung-204ui-smart
There is further info at http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks
I just want to help get the word out because I don't think this is a well known issue.
Today's PSA.
Edit: this is one reason why I match drives from different manufacturers when I build a RAID. I have one of these and it is mirrored with a Seagate ST32000542AS
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