I don't recall previously seeing reference to utilities for Samsung drives, so having had need to find some to investigate an annoying 8k of bad sectors on an 80G Spinpoint, thought I might post a link:

http://www.samsung.com/Products/Hard...ties/hutil.htm

It might not be clear straight away that there are four utilities, three are diagnostics, for different groups of drives - shdiag, SUTIL and HUTIL. You need to read through the lists of models to discover which utility to use for which drive.

HUTIL particularly seems to be comprehensive - diagnostics, zero-fill, set UDMA and acoustic modes, limit LBA size/recover native size...

Hope someone might find it useful sometime.