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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.

10 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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.

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    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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 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?
  4. 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/...

  5. 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...

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