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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.
"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?
More technical detail as to what is going on.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
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?
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.