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Samsung Acknowledges and Fixes Bug On 840 EVO SSDs

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-presented-on-a-platter dept.

Lucas123 writes: Samsung has issued a firmware fix for a bug on its popular 840 EVO triple-level cell SSD. The bug apparently slows read performance tremendously for any data more than a month old that has not been moved around on the NAND. Samsung said in a statement that the read problems occurred on its 2.5-in 840 EVO SSDs and 840 EVO mSATA drives because of an error in the flash management software algorithm. Some users on technical blog sites, such as Overclock.net, say the problem extends beyond the EVO line. They also questioned whether the firmware upgrade was a true fix or if it just covers up the bug by moving data around the SSD.

101 comments

  1. What about the Dell knockoffs? by CaptainStumpy · · Score: 2

    So are they going to fix the Samsung SM841 SSD or are we just screwed because we bought Dell?

    --
    It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
    1. Re:What about the Dell knockoffs? by pmsr · · Score: 1

      Good question. But I believe the SM841 is equivalent to the 840 Pro, hence not affected by this problem.

    2. Re:What about the Dell knockoffs? by cdrudge · · Score: 1

      Shouldn't you ask Dell that? Welcome to buying OEM-ed manufactured equipment. You (possibly) saved as you're now Dell's customer, not Samsung's.

    3. Re:What about the Dell knockoffs? by CaptainStumpy · · Score: 1

      Good question. But I believe the SM841 is equivalent to the 840 Pro, hence not affected by this problem.

      No its a real problem, but Samsung hasn't acknowledged it yet: http://www.overclock.net/t/151...

      --
      It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
    4. Re:What about the Dell knockoffs? by pmsr · · Score: 1

      Quite, but the 840 is not the same as the 840 PRO.

    5. Re: What about the Dell knockoffs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      are we just screwed because we bought Dell?

      what is this, a trick question?

    6. Re:What about the Dell knockoffs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Duuuuuude! You're getting a Dell!

  2. Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by mlts · · Score: 3, Informative

    This gets me wondering what brand of SSDs is best these days. I've read a lot of good about Intel brand drives, but wonder what is decent these days.

    1. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by tibit · · Score: 2

      I've had plenty of success with Crucial and their M500 and M550.

      --
      A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
    2. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by ArcadeMan · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'd rather go with stable than EXTREME, so I go with Intel. It might not be the fastest around, but we rarely hear about Intel SSD problems.

      Available soon below my post, someone with a story about failed Intel SSDs.

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    3. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      If you have a Mac, you can't go wrong with OWC. I almost bought a Samsung SSD but went with a OWC SSD.

    4. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · · Score: 1

      So far so good with the Intel ones I got almost 2 years ago. Got 2 120GB drives for OS and application drives and they have been chugging along just fine. I went for the reliability instead of max performance and didn't want to pay more for the Samsung drives which now looks like it was the better move.

      --
      Time to offend someone
    5. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Saithe · · Score: 1

      Nope, mine's been running pretty much non-stop for 5 years. Quality. Too bad my upgrade was an 840 EVO....

    6. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Informative

      They had that one a while back where the drive would mysteriously decide that it had a capacity of 8MB, though that has been quashed for some time.

      The tricky thing (and I'm not actually certain where they stand on this now) is that Intel's initial reputation was founded on the superior performance and reliability of the in-house controller design that they used in their x-18 and x-25, especially dramatic back when there was some utter garbage floating around (JMicron controllers, OCZ living up to their reputation) and the safe options were comparatively slow and extremely expensive.

      Then, for some reason, they just sat and stagnated on that controller design for several generations, and eventually shipped a Marvell controller in order to have something with SATA 6Gb support. Since then, they've released some Sandforce based stuff, and some of their own; but it isn't as clear exactly what "Intel" on the label means anymore.

    7. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by MetalliQaZ · · Score: 2

      I really like my OCZ SSD.

      --
      "Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
    8. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'd rather go with stable than EXTREME, so I go with Intel. It might not be the fastest around, but we rarely hear about Intel SSD problems.

      For SATA SSDs, there's no more extreme. All modern SSDs saturate a SATA-3 bus. If you wonder why they all benchmark at 540MB/sec reads and writes, that's why - SATA is the bottleneck, not the SSD.

      PCIe SSDs are where the "extreme" ones go, and even the most conservative ones are pretty damn fast - the old MacBook Air's SSD clocks in at 750MB/sec read and write. I think the newer ones can hit 1GB/'sec now easy.

      As for what to buy, well, Samsung, Intel and Toshiba are the general safe bets. Even with this bug, Samsung is still stable, just slow.

      Intel's got a history of failure as well, but they seem to have gotten beyond it, and while they're not stunners, they generally are solid.

      Toshiba's on the slower end of the scale, but Apple uses them, so they can't be TOO bad.

      And yes, I say Apple, but you can see what Dell uses as well. The big OEMs that ship lots of units will generally pick ones that give the least warranty and support issues and thus are more conservative. Plus, recalls are expensive.

      If you want to follow someone - pick Apple. Given the way news coverage is, if there's a problem with someone somewhere and their SSD in their Apple product, the whole world would know in a nanosecond. Someone as heavily scrutitinized as Apple (where even one failure in millions of computers sold would probably bring about SSD-gate) means if there is a real problem, you'd already know.

    9. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      No, I'll just agree with you. I own two Intel 120GB drives that have been running solidly for years. One is on my main programming workstation, so it gets pounded on daily, and the other is on my digital audio workstation. It's hard to extrapolate from small samples, but I went with the same brand as my former employer did when they installed SSDs, and I haven't been disappointed. Since the market has changed significantly from several years ago, I couldn't honestly tell someone that they're still the best - just that they were almost certainly so several years ago. However, it may very well be the case that Intel is still king of reliability.

      And also, seriously... SSDs have been on the market for a while now, and companies are STILL getting the wear-leveling algorithm wrong? That's one of the most crucial components of an SSD. We saw a rash of problems like this with early SSDs, which was a little more excusable since the tech was brand new for just about everyone. This is simply poor QA, or at least a refusal to acknowledge or fix what QA actually found, which probably happens more often than anyone would like to admit.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    10. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by LinuxIsGarbage · · Score: 4, Informative

      SSDs will saturate SATA-3 for sequential reads and writes. My Crucial M550 gets 500MB/s vs 150MB/s on my Western Digital. Over a 3 fold improvement!

      However where SSDs really shine is random reads and writes. This is why SSD's make PC's more responsive. My Crucial gets 26MB/s vs. 0.66MB/s on the WD. Almost 40 fold improvement, but not near saturating SATA-3. So there is still improvements to be made on random read/write performance.

      More and more I see PC's slowing to a grind, and it's due to the Hard drive thrashing crazily at less than 1MB/s! Put an SSD in (any SSD) and it speeds right up.

    11. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Thanks but I'll wait. Toshiba's OCZ heritage still make me cringe. A company the size of Apple can provision custom equipment and handles their own warranty issues. I'm under no delusion that my experience going to the same vendor will be comparable.

    12. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by LinuxIsGarbage · · Score: 2

      I've had plenty of success with Crucial and their M500 and M550.

      I recently had a new PC built. The shop was offering Kingston V300. A quick search showed that the Sandforce controller runs like crap with incompressible data, and Kingston changed suppliers after media did all their benchmarks, so all new units performed like crap.

      So searching for alternatives Samsung 840 EVO was a top pick. I was very close to pulling the trigger when I saw all these dire warnings about performance deteriorating with "old data". I knew a firmware fix was pending, but I didn't trust the fix so I kept looking.

      I ended up with a Crucial M550 from Amazon (good price). I hope I don't regret it.

      In the research I've done, Intel has an excellent reliability record, and OCZ has amazing performance, but questionable reliability.

    13. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's unfair to single out OCZ for the JMicron controller problem.
      At the time, most vendors did not provide firmware that properly managed free blocks - once you filled the drive up, the performance nosedived.
      OCZ was the first non-Intel vendor to fix the problem, with prompting by Anandtech.com.
      For a time, OCZ was the ONLY vendor that you could get a reasonably priced SSD from.
      I personally have not had any problem with OCZ SSDs, and I have been buying them since the JMicron days. They developed a reputation for poor quality, and then released their Vector 150 line, which they claimed was designed to correct that reputation. This seems to be a stellar SSD by all accounts.
      After some financial problems (improperly accounting for rebates), they were saved from bankruptsy by being bought by Toshiba.
      I switched to the Samsung 840 EVO series, but was having misgivings about support being provided by a 3rd party in Florida (only, I think), that was reported to be less than responsive. Now, this deteriorating performance with data that is one month "old".
      I wish I had stuck with OCZ.

    14. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      In the case of the SandForce controller Intel used for a bit, it was an extra 6 months of engineering custom firmware with SandForce, that was only used on the Intel drives. As far as more recent drives, I think two things are true, SSD technology, especially controller firmware is much more mature and Intel still spends more time on their engineering than a lot of vendors do.

      As far as this recent Sammy bug goes, it does not surprise me, they like to play fast and loose, create a lot of bleeding edge product and then see what works. I would not trust them with my data just as I don't trust that they've fixed rather than worked around their recent firmware issue.

    15. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      In the UK at least, Samsung still seems to be the highest rated, along with Crucial who both get 4.8/5 from numerous reviews.

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    16. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've bought 5 Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe series drives over the last 4 years for different machines, with great success. All still running with no issues or performance problems.

    17. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by ayesnymous · · Score: 0

      This gets me wondering what brand of SSDs is best these days. I've read a lot of good about Intel brand drives, but wonder what is decent these days.

      I've heard good things about the Crucial MX100 drives.

    18. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seriously, no mention for Crucial?

    19. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      For everyday work, an SSD help calm my aggression enormously. Nothing frustrates me more than having to wait on a machine that's capable of processing math billions of times faster than I ever could. There's no excuse for it. Now, test and working VMs run like a bat out of hell, and searching through content in Outlook is a breeze for reference lookup.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    20. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by perryizgr8 · · Score: 1

      If you have a Mac, and you are the kind of user who likes to self-upgrade his gear, you already went wrong.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
    21. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by jdwoods · · Score: 1

      I'm really happy with the 2 Crucial M550 SSD drives I bought (256GB:CT256M550SSD1 and 1TB:CT1024M550SSD1). I based my choice primarily on reliability. The performance is close to the fastest in that price range with stability features that are exceptional.

      --
      -- Jeff Woods
    22. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Andtalath · · Score: 1

      Usually they have improved firmware and a bit more redundant memory on them.

      Also, it was intel 320, and it lost almost all capacity if it was writing and lost power.

    23. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by felipou · · Score: 1

      If you want to follow someone - pick Apple. Given the way news coverage is, if there's a problem with someone somewhere and their SSD in their Apple product, the whole world would know in a nanosecond. Someone as heavily scrutitinized as Apple (where even one failure in millions of computers sold would probably bring about SSD-gate) means if there is a real problem, you'd already know.

      Don't be so sure about that. I and many others have had problems with the GPU soldering on 2011 Macbook Pros. This has been affecting lots of users since last year, and although there was some media coverage, I don't think it's gathering enough attention as you seem to imply it would.

      Some references:

      http://www.mbp2011.com/
      https://twitter.com/hashtag/mb...
      http://www.reddit.com/r/mbp201...

    24. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      I really liked mine, until it died a couple of weeks ago. Just over 18 months of service.

      Replaced it with a Crucial M550.

    25. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Avoid Sandforce controllers. They rely on being able to compress data for spare capacity and don't cope well with full drives.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    26. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by zyzko · · Score: 1

      840 and 840 EVO are using TLC NAND which is "early SSD" all over again in some respects, and the bug itself is not in the wear-leveling, but on read-retry on cells which are not written to for a certain period of time. Agressive wear leveling (by shifting the data around) can get around this problem, but it is not desirable, especially on TLC NAND which has fewer P/E cycles than MLC or SLC.

      So hopefully the fix is really in the read calibration to get "right" results from cells without retries, and not a workaround which would lower the life expectancy of the drive.

    27. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by chrish · · Score: 1

      Toshiba's on the slower end of the scale, but Apple uses them, so they can't be TOO bad.

      I wouldn't use that as an indicator of quality; my old MacBook Pro (the Core Duo ones where you could easily change battery/RAM/disk) featured "wonderful" Hitachi drives that failed ten times (that is, I had ten dead drives in less than six months) until I gave up on Apple's replacements and just ordered a Seagate.

      --
      - chrish
    28. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by FictionPimp · · Score: 1

      Right, because I couldn't want the aesthetic of a mac mini and want to keep using in 4 years down the road by adding ram and a SSD.

      That's just crazy talk.

      (The joke of it is that if you buy a mac mini today, it is crazy talk as you can't upgrade it.)

    29. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Luckyo · · Score: 2

      It's completely fair to single out OCZ as related to JMicron controller and sandforce controller issues. All of these controllers had a large set of options which could be tuned by manufacturer. OCZ was known for tuning for pure performance, disabling all reliability related functions in controllers whenever it could give them even a little bit of more performance on benchmarks.

      As a result they typically crushed others on benchmarks but drives had absolutely atrocious reliability. Business model was apparently to sell as much as possible so that massive warranty claims could be accounted for through growth. This business model failed and they went bankrupt.

    30. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      More and more I see PC's slowing to a grind, and it's due to the Hard drive thrashing crazily at less than 1MB/s! Put an SSD in (any SSD) and it speeds right up.

      while that's true, at least half the time they're swapping. Put in enough RAM and disable swap and they speed right up, too. Maybe not as much as SSD, but more RAM benefits you whether you have SSD or not.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    31. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      Proud owner of a Black MacBook (2006) for eight years until the CPU fan died for a second time. (Since it has a 32-bit CPU and applications are going 64-bit only, it doesn't make sense to repair the CPU fan again.) My next laptop will be a White MacBook (2010) that I'm going replace the DVD drive with a SSD, max out the memory to 16GB, and eventually replace the 250GB hard drive with another SSD.

    32. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by karnal · · Score: 1

      I've had an M500 480GB for about a year now, absolutely no issues - although I'm running it on SATA2 in an older Core2Quad board. Best money spent, even when comparing to the Raptor that was previously booting/running the system.

      --
      Karnal
    33. Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I put a 1TB M550 in my iMac for a new lease of life. Fully encrypted and runs like a dream.

  3. A read disturb problem by TFoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is almost certainly a firmware bug with their read disturb compensation. At least they're owning up to it - but wow.

  4. Fresh Data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This what doctor recommends for this bug.

  5. the fix, of course... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    will be moving data around waaaaaay too much to lower the useful life of the flash memory to warranty length + 1 day.

  6. Might not buy now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's awfully disappointing to hear as I was hoping to buy one of these soon. I might have to look elsewhere now, particularly because of that last statement "They also questioned whether the firmware upgrade was a true fix or if it just covers up the bug by moving data around the SSD."

    1. Re:Might not buy now by michelcolman · · Score: 1

      Apparently (according to the website) it only affects sectors that have been written to exactly once since the SSD was new, and never changed afterwards. Those sectors still work, but are read more slowly. Any sector that has had data written to it more than once, is not affected. So I guess I'm OK since I wiped and installed my OS several times, using encryption, so I imagine all sectors must have had stuff written to them more than once.

  7. DOS version? by CurryCamel · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Dos version for MAC, Linux users ... Will be released on end of Oct."
    http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/samsungssd/downloads.html?CID=AFL-hq-mul-0813-11000279/
    Let me guess - the source for that firmware patch is stored on a Samsung EVO 840 disk?

    1. Re:DOS version? by ArcadeMan · · Score: 1

      Maybe I'm missing something, but how are we supposed to run their DOS executable on a Mac?

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    2. Re:DOS version? by cdrudge · · Score: 1

      The same way that you're suppose to run their DOS executable on a Linux?

    3. Re:DOS version? by tibit · · Score: 2

      A modern Intel Mac will boot into FreeDOS, no problem. It's more like a PC without the BIOS Setup, and supports booting straight into OS X :)

      --
      A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
    4. Re:DOS version? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      Some vendors skip the helpful 'provide a damn bootable freeDOS image, you cheap bastards' step, which is very annoying; but it's pretty common to use DOS for firmware updates. When the vendor is feeling polite, and for more common ones, you usually get a windows executable with some dire warnings about running it as an administrator and not interrupting it; but DOS is a pretty good choice when you want an OS that isn't going to be multitasking behind your back as you scribble over some bit of firmware that will brick the device if handled indelicately.

      It probably will be an amusing test of whether Apple's BIOS emulation layer is up to scratch, or whether it was written rather closely against the specific versions of Windows supported by bootcamp and the bootcamp drivers...

    5. Re:DOS version? by LinuxIsGarbage · · Score: 2

      The same way that you're suppose to run their DOS executable on a Linux?

      The same way you run it on Windows?

      64 bit Windows will not even pretend to run 16 bit DOS/Windows 3.1 applications. 32 bit Windows NT (/XP/Vista/7/8) will, but it's in an emulator so it can't access the hardware.

      You need a freeDOS bootdisk. You can make it boot from CD or USB since most modern PC's don't have floppy drives.

      A DOS executable is almost preferable since it doesn't require a proprietary OS.

    6. Re:DOS version? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Informative

      The current firmware update ships as a bootable ISO. Burn it to a CD/DVD (or a flash drive if you can work it out), hold down "option" at boot, and you'll be looking at a DOS prompt in no time. I verified this two days ago when I misread the firmware version on the website and downloaded an updater for the version I already had.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    7. Re:DOS version? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It will likely be a bootable FreeDOS image. If they do the image properly, it can be used with the USB flash drives. But if they do it like the Seagate, one needs to find a empty CD-ROM, burn the image into it and also do the update with a system with a CD-ROM drive, which rules out most laptops.. The Seagate's firmware update procedure really, really sucks.

  8. Just bought 1 by kbrannen · · Score: 1

    Ah, crap, I just bought 1 too; which means none of data is more than a month old. At least they're giving away a fix. Gee, more mess to deal with... :(

  9. Anandtech had a WAY better article by ashpool7 · · Score: 5, Informative

    More technical detail as to what is going on.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

    1. Re:Anandtech had a WAY better article by TubeSteak · · Score: 1

      Several month old data?
      Isn't that like... 90% of Windows operating files?

      Most OS files are never overwritten until an update changes something.

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
    2. Re:Anandtech had a WAY better article by aliquis · · Score: 0

      If the amount of updates WHICH STILL REQUIRE ME TO REBOOT MY MACHINE is any indicator I'd say no.

    3. Re:Anandtech had a WAY better article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's amusing I got slammed a little while back on /. for commenting that my experience with Samsung EVO SSD's was they rapidly deteriorated and when I said I got rid of 2 of them I was called out as a liar, nice to see the issue has been identified.

    4. Re:Anandtech had a WAY better article by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      If the amount of updates WHICH STILL REQUIRE ME TO REBOOT MY MACHINE is any indicator I'd say no.

      It isn't. Most of those updates only require a reboot because of laziness, not because open files can't be replaced.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  10. Samsung 830 by nekolaibaikov · · Score: 1

    Glad I haven't upgraded from my Samsung 830 256GB from 2 years ago this month. Still chugging along like a champ with no degradation.

  11. Classic Samsung... by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 4, Informative

    Couldn't write a proper wear levelling algorithm if their life depended on it.

    First the MAG4FA/KYL00M/VYL00M data corruption bug that affected the Galaxy Nexus - https://android.googlesource.c...

    Then (actually BEFORE it, Google found it during Galaxy Nexus development but Samsung kept it hush-hush - but it became a public issue much later) - the infamous Samsung Superbrick fiasco (If you fired a secure erase command at the chip, it had a chance of permanently corrupting the wear leveller data to the point where the chip's onboard controller would crash until you power cycled it any time you accessed that region of flash). - https://git.kernel.org/cgit/li...

    Then pre-release 840 PRO devices suffer from the SAME DAMN BUG SAMSUNG HAD BEEN AWARE OF FOR OVER A YEAR - http://www.anandtech.com/show/... - While this only affected review devices, the fact that this was a known bug since before the release of the Galaxy Nexus (a year earlier) is inexcusable.

    Then there was the Galaxy S3 "Sudden Death Syndrome" issue in late 2013... - https://github.com/omnirom/and...

    Then there were a few other issues - http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/...

    Now this...

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    1. Re:Classic Samsung... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      but... but... but... It'z teh Samsungs!!!!!!!

    2. Re:Classic Samsung... by thegarbz · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Still a better love story than the one with OCZ.

      Before you go attacking a company on a general sense, take a look at what they make. In the case of Samsung which make... Everything from what I can tell, it's little wonder that the occasional product has an issue. Calling out 5 products out of the several thousand they make is hardly a cause of concern, much like 5 bent iphones isn't either

    3. Re:Classic Samsung... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Be careful with Linux and MacOSX drives - the notes say that only NTFS is supported.
      Not sure what that means - surely the firmware upgrade is simply flashing new code to the nvram of the SSD.
      Perhaps it is the subsequent "performance restoration" step, where the contents of the drive are re-written to make the data "new" as oposed to "old".?
      Not sure why FAT drives would not be supported.

    4. Re:Classic Samsung... by fnj · · Score: 1

      Easy with the fan boi sucking-up there. Samsung is a CORPORATION. If they can't make products that are any fucking goddam good, to hell with them. You stand by your family and close friends through thick and thin, NOT corporations trying to get rich off the money you pay for their products. I'll reward the corps that prove themselves with my custom, just as long as it is to my advantage. Those that cynically betray me can go try to soak other customers; they will be dead to me.

      If Samsung Heavy Industries makes good supertankers and windmills, fine. That doesn't affect my buying.

    5. Re:Classic Samsung... by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 1

      I don't trust samsung. but sadly, I did buy a bunch of 840 evo drives over the last year or 2. damn.

      samsung is known as the company that makes things last 'the warranty period + 1 day'. almost literally. almost to an art form.

      samsung lcd's also are built like crap. one after another, their electrolytics die (fake china caps; like so many others). buying japanese (nichicon, panasonic, etc) low ESR caps usually brings the monitors back to life. I've fished several out of the trash cans and restored them via simple psu cap replacements.

      but dammit samsung, why do you have to be SO cheap??

      guess I should start avoiding all samsung things, now. I'm tired of their crap.

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    6. Re:Classic Samsung... by thegarbz · · Score: 0

      Being a fanboi and having a good sense of perspective are two very different things.

      All of the examples of the parent show that there is a company which releases patches to solve issues. It shows a sense of a company which has had 1 serious issue which they fixed out of a line of about 60 smartphones they have released in the past 5 years. Quite interestingly some of the bugs had strange edge cases, e.g. installing CM causes issues due to firmware design and this is supposed to be Samsung's problem who have released a fine working product? Really?

      No I care about one thing and one thing only, what is the affect on me? I have yet to experience a problem with a Samsung product that wasn't resolved by a patch issued by them. Yet that label makes me some kind of fanboi for calling out the GP who claims they can't code for shit because of {insert barely related bug here}?

      You and I are the same, I too reward corporations that do good, I also do so by recommending their products to others and hosing down what appears to be either a grossly missinformed post or an intentional troll.

    7. Re:Classic Samsung... by higuita · · Score: 1

      samsung lcd's also are built like crap. one after another, their electrolytics die (fake china caps; like so many others).
      (...)
      but dammit samsung, why do you have to be SO cheap??

      Because when something fails, most users will buy a new one instead of repairing the last one... and guess what... probably they will buy another samsung device! So instead of selling one TV each 15 years, they sell one each 3-5 years... even if just 1/3 of original buyers buy again samsung, it is still a win situation for then.

      Of course, the solution is to first repair the old devices (samsung is also making sure that it is harder and harder to do that! thin devices is the excuse to use hard to replace hardware... see apple and how to repair their devices) and when buying, choose a little more expensive tv (many of times just 20$ to 50$ more) from other good brand. If something fail in short time, complain to that brand and buy from another brand.

      If known brands use the same quality from cheap chinese brands, then there is no need to buy known brands

      --
      Higuita
    8. Re:Classic Samsung... by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      Because when something fails, most users will buy a new one instead of repairing the last one... and guess what... probably they will buy another samsung device! So instead of selling one TV each 15 years, they sell one each 3-5 years... even if just 1/3 of original buyers buy again samsung, it is still a win situation for then.

      This is not an issue just with TVs, laptops, phones, routers, cars, washing machines, dishwashers, etc, are all cheaper to replace than repair if you cannot do it yourself. Sadly, the ability to fix things like this appears to be a shrinking skill set, but for those that have it and can afford an hour or two here or there, you'll save tons of money over your lifespan. I know I saved several thousand just in the past couple of months being a plumber, mechanic, electrician carpenter and painter. That leaves money to do other things.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    9. Re:Classic Samsung... by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 1

      Um, it's not 5 products out of several thousand. These are all screwups by a single division that refuses to learn from their mistakes and repeatedly makes the same kinds of mistakes over and over again.

      They KNEW that the VYL00M/MAG4FA/KYL00M fwrev 0x19 was faulty, and they kept on shipping it for MONTHS in devices even though they had a newer fwrev (0x25) that didn't cause these problems.

      They KNEW they had a track record of secure erase issues, and a year after becoming aware of a device-bricking bug, they were STILL shipping products vulnerable to that bug (the 840 Pro secure erase mess).

      You simply don't see this sort of crap occur with eMMC chips from other manufacturers like Toshiba. Yeah, some of them have quirks, but none of them have such severe bugs that they render the device they're installed in unrepairable without a motherboard replacement.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    10. Re:Classic Samsung... by Bengie · · Score: 1

      When looking up Samsung products, I see few complains and many long time users. I can't say this is the case for many of the other options. Not only does Samsung compete with price for SSDs, but they have the best track record of them all, even Intel. At least the Samsung 850 has a 10 year warranty. If you're still using that SSD 10 years from now, that would be sad.

    11. Re:Classic Samsung... by toddestan · · Score: 1

      Perhaps it is the subsequent "performance restoration" step, where the contents of the drive are re-written to make the data "new" as oposed to "old".?

      That would be my guess. Before TRIM became a thing, some of the early drives would try to understand the file system to know what blocks weren't being used. Many of these drives only understood NTFS which is why they wouldn't perform as well in Linux (or if you ran Windows but turned on full disk encryption).

  12. Windows only; NTFS only by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    https://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/samsungssd/downloads/Samsung_Performance_Restoration_v10_Installation_guide.pdf

    Page 4 says:

    System Requirements
    Operating System
    Windows XP SP2 (32bit)
    Windows Vista (32/64bit)
    Windows 7 (32/64bit)
    Windows 8 & 8.1 (32/64bit)

    ...

    Supported Partition Types
    MBR, GPT

    Page 5 says: Intel chipset is supported with Microsoft and Intel drivers. AMD chipset is supported with Microsoft, AMD and NVIDIA drivers, but the AMD driver is only supported for the latest driver.

    Page 6 says:

    7) Performance Restoration supports only the NTFS file system.

    Blah. I'm running Linux with ext4 on my Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB (EXT0BB6Q).
    Am I totally screwed?

    1. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by KozmoStevnNaut · · Score: 2

      There will be a bootable DOS disk image for Mac and Linux users. It's supposed to be released late October, according to the download page:

      https://www.samsung.com/global...

      --
      Eat the rich.
    2. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by craighansen · · Score: 1

      Am I totally screwed?

      Yes, unless you can wait 'tii the end of October for the LInux version (which may be a DOS executable). Alternatively, presumably the firmware upgrade can be done by moving the drive to a Windows box without doing the "Performance Restoration".

    3. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Also Intel-only. At least on my AMD board it tells me that "I have to disable 3rd party drivers", this despite absolutely current AMD AHCI drivers. Somebody really messed up at Samsung.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    4. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by damnbunni · · Score: 1

      You can use a bootable DOS disk/USB stick to update the firmware.

      The 'performance restoration' part just rewrites all the data on the disk. You can get the same effect by backing up the disk, formatting, and copying all the data back.

      (Brief summary: The problem makes data slower to read as it sits there. The firmware fix prevents that from recurring, rewriting the data fixes it on already-existing data. There's no data loss associated with this, just speed.)

    5. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > USB stick

      Assuming your system supports booting from USB. I've got 76 Dell R410 servers that do not support USB boot with Samsung SSD drives that need to be updated. It's going to take me a couple of long nights to boot from a USB floppy drive. Fortunately Dell allows still allows that, but our salesrep says that they're soon going to disallow USB floppy booting.

    6. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We found a solution for all of the Dell garbage that won't boot off of USB. It's called the trash. I will never buy more servers that do not allow booting from USB. I understand that they had trouble implementing the feature, but this is taking them just too many damn years to add support for it.

    7. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 1

      short answer: yes.

      I would not trust their 'fix' if they actually work at the filesystem level.

      you'd think this was a sector based issue. you'd think!

      even if there is a dos bootable for this, unless it understands ext2/3/4 (and maybe others; jfs, reiser, xfs) then linux guys ARE screwed by this.

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    8. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Managed it with going back to the msahci driver (select update -> available on this machine).

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    9. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by johu · · Score: 1

      > Blah. I'm running Linux with ext4 on my Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB (EXT0BB6Q).
      > Am I totally screwed?

      Not totally as long as your chipset is supported, but almost.

      All you need to do is extract actual SSD firmware upgrade file from Windows executable, then create freedos bootable USB stick, copy DOS updater files extracted from older Samsung DOS updater download and add those new SSD firmware from new Windows updater to your custom upgrade USB stick. After you have managed to upgrade SSD firmware boot system using some live linux and do non-destructive badblocks read+rewrite scan over entire SSD.

    10. Re:Windows only; NTFS only by michelcolman · · Score: 1

      You can get the same effect by backing up the disk, formatting, and copying all the data back.

      Or much simpler (on a Mac, anyway), turn full disk encryption off and then on again. You can even continue to work while it's rewriting the entire disk.

  13. How bad is Samsung, really? by swb · · Score: 1

    I've used or installed a dozen or more 840 SSDs and never had a problem with any of them, including the 470 model I'm using now.

    Is what's being fixed a widespread problem or a corner case of specific uses?

  14. Can that run on Linux under Wine? by ron_ivi · · Score: 1

    Don't have Windows here. Would be nice if they had a firmware patch that could run on Linux.

    1. Re:Can that run on Linux under Wine? by craighansen · · Score: 1

      Would not recommend running under Wine. Pull the drive to a Windows box, backup to other media, upgrade firmware and reimage or wait for the Linux/DOS version.

    2. Re:Can that run on Linux under Wine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have an extra box or two laying around. I could SELL it to you, because I don't believe in FREE as in MOOCHING. Would be nice if all these sophisticated Linux users used their brain once in a while.

    3. Re:Can that run on Linux under Wine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Considering people usually have to pay to get someone to carry away old junk, someone offering to take it for free is the one doing you a favor...

  15. Encryption on SSD? by Erikderzweite · · Score: 1

    What implications are there for encrypted LVMs? Is it advisable to run such a setup on an SSD anyway or will it break some internal algorithms?

    1. Re:Encryption on SSD? by Nemyst · · Score: 1

      According to AnandTech's coverage, you need to turn off hardware encryption before running the tool.

  16. VNAND by sonicmerlin · · Score: 2

    VNAND run at current 1X node levels should provide 32x the capacity for similar cost. Instead Samsung is using their tech to release 4X node level SSDs with similar capacity but double the cost of 1X node level 2D NAND. When the heck are we going to have some competitors come in with their own VNAND tech and bottom out the SSD market? They should even be able to achieve greater cost per byte effectiveness than HDDs.

    1. Re:VNAND by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I like VNAND at 4X node levels.

      High reliaiblity, endurance and performance when node features are not pushed to the bleeding edge.

    2. Re:VNAND by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

      Can you please back this up with some facts, figures, articles? Interesting post but I'm not honestly sure I'm sold here?

      If they could, why wouldn't they?

    3. Re:VNAND by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you seen how complicated the VNAND is? I think Moore will have work on this at a higher speed than conventional flash. That will be where the gain lies.

  17. misalignment also results in crappy performance by Browzer · · Score: 2

    In my case, based on hdparm -t on xubuntu and centos, the difference between a properly aligned Samsung EVO and an improperly aligned Samsung EVO is 510 MB/sec and 182 MB/sec respectively

    http://cillian.wordpress.com/2... has some good info on setting up Samsung EVO properly on linux

  18. 830 Series by Tasha26 · · Score: 1

    My 512GB 830 series heats up like the CPU does. The 500GB traditional 7200rpm drive next to it stays relatively cool. I thought SSD were the future of the storage, not a flipping burn/fire hazard!

  19. The before and after pics by dafradu · · Score: 1

    250GB EVO running for a year now, i never noticed slowdows using it as my daily SO drive. I guess its because the frequently accessed files aren't affected by this bug, i would have to run a complete drive read test to find out.

    I did a test with a tool in one of the links and got the same results as other people.
    http://i.imgur.com/1xomFsK.png
    See how the graph goes down as age of files increases.

    After running the tool to update the firmware and "optimize" the drive the graph is very different.
    http://i.imgur.com/37m1bkn.png

    Now i have to check again in a couple of months. I could run a full defrag and get the same result since all files would've been moved.

  20. I really wish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That I read this article BEFORE I started a time machine recovery of a 1TB drive that's at 85% usage. My Yosemite upgrade lasted 2 days before I decided Mavericks has less issues that I am willing to deal with right now. So here I am looking at my mac with another 4hrs to travel in time wondering if I should just nuke it now and firmware it so I can format it or should I wait another week for a possible performance restoration tool for osx...

  21. RAID 5 solution? by Wizardess · · Score: 1

    I wonder if I can "fix" my RAID 5 system with a one disk at a time approach. Pull a drive. Use Linux to zero the drive. Use Windows to build the requisite NTFS partition to prevent complaints. Run the update. Rezero the partition information. And finally reinstall the drive in the RAID and let the RAID rebuild. Lather, rinse, repeat three more times for the other disks.

    Of course, methinks I'll take a complete disk image backup of the RAID just in case.

    Any thoughts regarding this approach? Is there anything simpler that can be done?

    {^_^}