Samsung Acknowledges and Fixes Bug On 840 EVO SSDs

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.

Comments

Wonder what brand is best now... Intel?

[mlts]

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.

Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

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.

Re:Wonder what brand is best now... Intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

DOS version?

[CurryCamel]

"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?

Re:DOS version?

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Anandtech had a WAY better article

[ashpool7]

More technical detail as to what is going on.

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

Classic Samsung...

[Andy Dodd]

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...