New Samsung SSD 840 EVO Read Performance Fix Coming Later This Month

An anonymous reader writes: The Samsung SSD 840 EVO read performance bug has been on the table for over six months now. Initially Samsung acknowledged the issue fairly quickly and provided a fix only a month after the news hit the mainstream tech media, but reports of read performance degradation surfaced again a few weeks after the fix had been released, making it clear that the first fix didn't solve the issue for all users. Two months ago Samsung announced that a new fix is in the works and last week Samsung sent out the new firmware along with Magician 4.6 for testing, which will be available to the public later this month.

Comments

Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

Six months is not an acceptable time to wait for a performance fix for an SSD drive. The very essence of an SSD is "speed".

I offloaded the EVO's on eBay (being honest about the reason) and got myself a couple of Plextor Pro drives. Running in RAID0 they are a bit slower at random reads than the EVOs, but faster at sustained transfer rates.

An SSD with slow/degraded performance is like a burger without the beef... something is missing...!

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[davester666]

Good. Fast. Cheap.

You bought Samsung, so you picked cheap.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

Not quite. The specs on the EVO 840's are actually very good ... if only they lived up to them!

If this new fix actually works, the EVO's will be a very good buy. Pretty reliable too according to tests. I just couldn't wait (and had no idea if/when a fix was ever going to surface).

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought on of these for my laptop, knowing about the bug, because that data migration tool is pretty nifty and I lacked the patience to wait for the M.2 850 EVO.

So yeah, glad to hear about this fix. Will be installed.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. RAID 0 - your data mustn't be important to you.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[Christian Smith]

I offloaded the EVO's on eBay (being honest about the reason) and got myself a couple of Plextor Pro drives. Running in RAID0 they are a bit slower at random reads than the EVOs, but faster at sustained transfer rates.

Wow, so you replaced your existing drives with a performance "problem", with some new drives that you yourself admit are slower at random reads (BTW, guess what sort of reads are more important to the perception of speed). Do you really think you're a savvy consumer?

This whole EVO performance problem is a crock of shit. People only noticed the problem running synthetic benchmarks. For normal usage, there'll be no perceptible performance issue with these drives. And yes, I have a couple of EVO drives, and yes, they are also hit with the performance issue. I just don't notice because it's such a non-issue outside of synthetic benchmarks.

Data safety is key, and there have been no reports as far as I'm aware of this issue affecting data integrity.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

Why?

SSDs are pretty reliable. I also have daily automated backup of my entire drive, and all important documents are synced with a SkyDrive account.

And ... I need the extra performance for virtual machines. :-)

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

Hey, why the attitude man? Did it somehow offend you that I decided to replace the drives? Are you so emotionally attached to your own identity as an EVO customer that you must attack people who choose differently?

I used the EVO 840 from virtually the same week they became available. Performance was great, but it slowly degraded with time passed. The decrease was very visible for large blocks of data which were read often but not refreshed or updated. Not just on synthetic benchmarks. My usage pattern fits that bill because I use several virtual machines that are 40 - 120 GB large, and only a small portion of their virtual disk files are changed (SQL database files). Moving the virtual machine to an external drive and back on to the SSD's solved the problem, but shuffling around 120 GB virtual servers in order to "keep the memory cells happy" is a chore I'd rather be without.

Perhaps the issue was more visible to me because I run 2 drives in RAiD0 which means I get hit by the degradation twice - once for each drive. Never the less, the issue was very real to me. YMMV off course, but please accept that your own perception of this issue is not the universal truth.

In regards to your snarky comment about me being a "savvy consumer": Yes, I believe I am a reasonably savvy consumer when it comes to SSD drives. I am a Business Intelligence specialist and I am quite confident in my ability to understand and evaluate disk read performance. It is part of my job. When analyzing large amounts of data or operating virtual servers (booting or resuming), sustained data transfer is very important. The slightly lower random read performance of my Plextor Pro drives is a very good trade-off for the added sustained transfer rate. In addition the Plextor pro drives use a server-grade controller chip with a GC routine that works very well without TRIM. Since I operate in RAID mode that is also a concern when I buy drives. My Laptop does not support TRIM in RAID mode (desktop/gaming rig does though).

Not everybody on the planet uses their computer in exactly the same way as you do.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[swb]

It looks like a serious degredation of peformance from the perspective of the difference between what the drives should be capable of versus what the bug limits them to, but the GP poster sort has a point in that the drive's performance doesn't seem to be dropping even to the level of a USB3 flash disk let alone a mechanical SATA disk.

Obviously nobody but the actual user of a specific setup would know whether or not it was burdensome, but I would be kind of surprised if it was generally noticable. I see a lot of commercial SANs in use by medium sized enterprises as backing stores for VM host clusters consisting of TBs of data used by SQL, SMB, Exchange that don't exceed 1000 IOPS and 75 MB/sec.

If this represents a real business workload, I would be kind of curious to know what kind of a workload you'd have to present to a stripe set of SSDs to see the effects of this performance bug. The linked article shows some kind of performance graph hitting a low of 100 MB/sec sustained read. A raid 0 stripe would be close to 200 MB/sec sustained read at worst. Maybe you'd notice it, but it seems like a pretty unusual workload that would expose this.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[Lumpy]

No I skipped Samsung as they are pricey compared to the Crucial... Yet the Crucial outperforms the Samsung over and over again.

The problem is Samsung screwed up and shipped drives that cant live up to the claims.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

By your own admission you bought Samsung EVO 840s first, a drive that is well known to lose data on even a slight power hiccup.

Re: Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[bill_mcgonigle]

I would be kind of surprised if it was generally noticable

Amazon reviews are quite positive.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[goarilla]

This whole EVO performance problem is a crock of shit. People only noticed the problem running synthetic benchmarks. For normal usage, there'll be no perceptible performance issue with these drives. And yes, I have a couple of EVO drives, and yes, they are also hit with the performance issue. I just don't notice because it's such a non-issue outside of synthetic benchmarks.

Bullshit I have 2 EVO's and I did notice. Some regions were very very slow (50-60 MB/s).
When your VM copy suddenly takes 5-10 times as long as expected, you do notice.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[goarilla]

But motherboard Raid is usually fakeRAID.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[St.Creed]

If this represents a real business workload, I would be kind of curious to know what kind of a workload you'd have to present to a stripe set of SSDs to see the effects of this performance bug. The linked article shows some kind of performance graph hitting a low of 100 MB/sec sustained read. A raid 0 stripe would be close to 200 MB/sec sustained read at worst. Maybe you'd notice it, but it seems like a pretty unusual workload that would expose this.

I recently hit 600 MB/s disk throughput on our current test database (the interface limit). I was trying to do an incremental load of machine logs that have 16 datapoints per discrete item - and the machines process tens of millions of items per day. The datamodel wasnt as smart as it should have been, and the database had incorrect analytics, leading it to the conclusion that walking through the entire table (250GB data) row-by-row was a smart move...

But that was on a small sample of the data, so when we load two years of machinelogs, we're going to see if we run up against the limit again. We hope so - that should wipe the smile of the faces of those smug storage operators :)

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[St.Creed]

And I should have added: We corrected the modeling mistakes. So now it's down to 50 MB/s at its peak, on test. Given the datamodel and the layout of the incoming data we don't expect it to get much higher even with bigger data loads.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[nabsltd]

Yes, I believe I am a reasonably savvy consumer when it comes to SSD drives. I am a Business Intelligence specialist and I am quite confident in my ability to understand and evaluate disk read performance. It is part of my job. When analyzing large amounts of data or operating virtual servers (booting or resuming), sustained data transfer is very important.

In which case, you shouldn't have picked the 840 EVO to start with, but rather the 840 Pro (or 850 Pro now).

If you want true performance, you have to pay for it. I have a pair of 840 EVOs myself because I don't need the extra speed from faster drives, and the price was right.

Re: Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[TheGratefulNet]

amazon reviews?

other than the occasional smart guy there, amazon is a joke for reviews. I look at the q/a section and someone asks a valid question, some idiot replies "sorry, I don't know the answer to that, but I love this product so much!".

sigh!!!

much worse than AOL ever was. and that says something.

what is it about amazon that draws the lowest iq's to 'respond' to questions saying 'I don't know'? is it some dialog box that pops up saying 'please answer this'? why spend time answering a question (that clearly is meant to help others) with an IDK reply? boggles my mind!

amazon reviews are mostly useless; not even including the ones that are paid shill reviews in broken korean, chinese and hindi.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hit by this on a windows 7 machine, on which I noticed the boot time and certain large applications load time degrading steadily. Solidworks, for example, is absolutely enormous, and was slowing down to a speed of less than the original rotating storage I'd upgraded to an SSD from.

When I tested the drive with HDtune, large parts of the drive, mainly static OS files and application files, had slowed to the point I was seeing 100KB/s transfer rates (yes, kilobytes per second!) rather than the 450 MB/s or better it managed on fresh data. Trust me, this has an extremely noticeable effect on the use of the machine.

I patched the firmware with the latest version, ran the samsung fixing tool, and all was well. For a couple of months. Recently I found the thing slowly degrading again although not as badly, down to about 50MB/s in some cases. I ended up backing up the entire drive, booting into linux and DDing zeros to the thing, then restoring it again. That seems to have fixed it for the moment, but it will be interesting to see if it does long term. I suspect not.

On the up side, the drive is reliable, and when not exhibiting this problem, extremely fast. Plus it was free, part of a weird deal I got from Amazon, so that's nice.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

Actually they perform as advertised when they're new, or when the data is refreshed. So your claim is wrong.

The degraded performance occurred when blocks of data remained unchanged for many months. And the fix was somewhat easy: Run the Samsung optimizer tool or alter the data.

You can criticize them for the degradation-bug, sure. But to claim they shipped drives that did not live up to claimed performance is wrong.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

Really? I haven't heard that, and none of the drives used at our small company have failed in that way (I believe we have a total of around 40-45 EVO drives in various sizes). I also haven*t seen reputable sources criticize their reliability?

Feel free to share your source for this; if it's any good I'll certainly pass it on to our infrastructure guys.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

Generally speaking most "Enterprise" VMs on slow SANs suck. Really - seriously - suck!

And no, it does not represent real business workloads unless the company in question is either being cheap, or their infrastructure team has no clue what they're doing.

Don't get me wrong; VMs on a SAN can be fine if the SAN is any good. The best SAN I have seen to date was at one of our clients where it was used for the primary servers running a complex ERP solution. It provided almost a full million IOPS when benchmarked at its installation date (they bought it new when we started our project with them). I can't say for sure if the massive performance threw the benchmarking software off so it was actually lower, but it was fast as hell to work with as well.

My laptop gives me around 14.000 IOPS at random reads with a Que Depth of 1, and around 120.000 IOPS with a Que Depth of 16, for Random Reads. Data transfer for sequential reads is around 900 MB/s which is pretty fair for a laptop. Its based on an Intel RST RAID0 aray and to Plextor M5 Pro drives.

My previous array with 840 EVO's had slightly better random reads and somewhat worse sequential read performance. And the bug mentioned in TFA was very noticeable for large VM's... like a bloated 120 GB Windows server with a lot of concurrent services.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

No, that hasn't been true for quite a while. At least not on workstation or gaming-grade motherboards. They all come with an Intel controller and Rapid Storage Technology which performs quite well for simple raid volumes like 0 and 1. Probably because there is much less work for these volumes than for the complex ones, like RAID 5, 6, 50 and 60.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

For the 840 series, the EVO is almost as fast as the Pro. The difference is about 3-5% depending on sources. The price of the pro is almost double that of the EVO. So no, I'd say the Pro only makes sense if you want the added reliability and extended warranty.

The difference was bigger for the previous series, and I haven't checked the new 850 drives. But if you're in the 840 series then the Pro actually makes very little sense unless you get it at a bargain price.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I was just about to pull the trigger on the 840 Evo in October for my new rig when quick research found reports of these slowdowns. So far I don't regret going with Crucial M550. I specced out M500's for my parents computers and they've been happy as well.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[Christian Smith]

This whole EVO performance problem is a crock of shit. People only noticed the problem running synthetic benchmarks. For normal usage, there'll be no perceptible performance issue with these drives. And yes, I have a couple of EVO drives, and yes, they are also hit with the performance issue. I just don't notice because it's such a non-issue outside of synthetic benchmarks.

Bullshit I have 2 EVO's and I did notice. Some regions were very very slow (50-60 MB/s).

When your VM copy suddenly takes 5-10 times as long as expected, you do notice.

OK, 99.9% of the use cases won't notice. Entire VM copies are probably quite rare, and are generally not an interactive type of operation (you don't sit there watching it copy, waiting for it to finish.)

I've got a 840 EVO machine that's been powered off for a couple of months. I can't wait to power it up again and see if I do indeed perceive performance issues.

Re: Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[LinuxIsGarbage]

is it some dialog box that pops up saying 'please answer this'?

I've received emails before from amazon saying "You bought this product, can you answer this question?"

Taken with a grain of salt, Amazon reviews can sometimes show useful information:
-Two similar products on Amazon, if one has a high rate of failure, that usually becomes apparent comparing average ratings, and distribution of ratings
-Comments sometimes provide indication as far as common failure modes "This drive started slowing down after months", or other common problems, that you can then use for further research.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[davester666]

Really? Just reset the drive and it goes fast again?

Do you want to keep the Samsung SSD that's in this drawer?
Yes, it's the fastest SSD I own.
Why isn't it in one of your computers?
Because once I use it, it goes slower than all the other SSDs I have.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. The specs on the EVO 840's are actually very good ... if only they lived up to them!

Why does it surprise you that Samsung, as an Asian company, has difficulties telling the truth?

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[swb]

We sell and install Compellents where I work and AFAIK the models with flash tiers are marketed at 300k IOPS max. 1M IOPS sounds like a benchmarking flaw.

Maybe it would be possible to get 1M with multiple SSD enclosures uitlizing multilple SAS backend loops, but something tells me it would have to represent the sum of many workloads, not what would be possible for a single workload once you account for some latency associated with synchronizing dual controllers and the front end fabric connectivity limitations and RAID computation. Plus it would be outrageously expensive.

But the gimmick of Compellent I don't think is necessarily with single workload maximum throughputs, it's maximizing throughput relative to total system capacity with automatic tiering to cheaper disk.

I think the irony of this model, though, is that as SSD prices fall, capacities increase and general reliability goes up this whole model kind of falls apart. Why would you even bother tiering to slow rust if you could just use all flash? It greatly decreaes the software complexity, power consumption, etc.

The bigger problem becomes bus connectivity to lots of SSDs. A 24 slot shelf of SSDs seems like its pushing the envelope of SAS bus connectivity.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

The bug does not affect your data for at least a couple of months. And running the Samsung tool fixes it completely - as does moving the data to new blocks (though OS files are somewhat harder to move around if they're not in a virtual disk file).

Not sure if you're trolling or just being contrary out of principle. But yeah, I'll take the EVO in your drawer if you insist it is unusable. Hell, I'll even make a donation to the EFF worth the drives second-hand value when I receive it. Let me know if you want my address for shipping.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

Out of curiosity I contacted them and asked about the benchmark. Turns out they simulated 5 high-load servers running concurrently by started the bechmark tool on 5 different virtual servers on the SAN and running them at the same time, taking the average values for about 7 minutes of benchmarks. Each server reported around 192.000 IOS at a QD of 16, for a total of approx 960.000 IOPS.

There was no other activity on the SAN an the servers were small so it's a pretty fair bet that 100% of the load was on the SSD tier, which contained 48 SSDs in two separate enclosures.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[SplatMan_DK]

I think your 99,9% assertion is flat out wrong.

Any file regardless of size which is unchanged for several months will be subject to this issue. This is not isolated to "pro" stuff like databases and virtual servers, but also includes locally stored video files, games, photos, etc.

Re:Too late; already sold my EVO's on eBay

[swb]

Wow, that is impressive. I doubt I'll ever see that much write intensive flash in one place. We added a flash tier to a seed install (dumb customer only bought a single 15k tier and wondered why performance sucked) and I can never get over how fucking outrageously expensive the flash tier costs. I think it was pushing $100k.

I'd wager that mid range flash like the Samsung 850 Pros are getting cheap enough that double parity, double hot spares and replacing disks regularly due to burnout is probably cheaper for nearly the same performance than buying write intensive flash for all but the most intensive applications.

It's too bad that inexpensive SAN controllers rely on such cheap processors and NICs. I think it's getting to the point where fairly dumb controllers and bulk prosumer ssds will outperform tiering controllers.

EVO 850

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the EVO 850 better on this respect (degraded performance)? Thanks!

Re:EVO 850

[SplatMan_DK]

I think you can fully expect Samsung to apply the firmware fix to all subsequent EVO series if applicable.

Re:EVO 850

[Anonymous Coward]

There has been no evidence of EVO 850 suffering from a similar issue.

Re:EVO 850

[Christian Smith]

I think you can fully expect Samsung to apply the firmware fix to all subsequent EVO series if applicable.

I'd expect the TLC FLASH in the 850 EVO to be much more robust against this sort of issue, being of a much bigger process size (50nm?) and suffering less electron leakage as a result.

Personally, I'd be happy to continue buying Samsung drives as and when required, especially the 3D VNAND based ones, with all the benefits that 3D NAND brings. Of course, that might change as other vendors introduce 3D NAND, but it's likely to change on a value basis, rather than any technical basis.

I have no affiliation to Samsung other than being a satisfied customer of their drives. I also have SSD drives from Sandisk, Crucial, Intel and KingFast, so I'm no Samsung fanboy either.

Re:EVO 850

[jones_supa]

I'd expect the TLC FLASH in the 850 EVO to be much more robust against this sort of issue, being of a much bigger process size (50nm?) and suffering less electron leakage as a result.

The bug is absolutely not caused by electron leakage! Flash drives would be dying all the time if that was the case.

Re:EVO 850

[Christian Smith]

I'd expect the TLC FLASH in the 850 EVO to be much more robust against this sort of issue, being of a much bigger process size (50nm?) and suffering less electron leakage as a result.

The bug is absolutely not caused by electron leakage! Flash drives would be dying all the time if that was the case.

Electrons absolutely do leak. It's slow, but TLC is more vulnerable to voltage changes from electron leakage. JEDEC specs even dictate the minimum amount of time of data should be correctly retained without power.

The firmware fix appears to be to just rewrite old data, so that cells are regularly freshly programmed to avoid the costly read error recovery cycles that reduce performance.

Re:EVO 850

[jones_supa]

I did not refute electron leakage, but said that this bug was not caused by it. Well, on the other hand, Flash devices do walk the cells periodically to refresh them, so maybe Samsung botched something on that department. I still suspect that this is something completely different.

Reliability, Performance, Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Pick two.

Yay

[JoelKatz]

I'm looking forward to pulling all my mSATA EVOs out of their RAID controllers, inserting them one at a time into a spare PC with one mSATA slot, and upgrading their firmware. The last update (which also rewrites all data) took over two hours per drive, and it looks like this next one is going to take just as long. Anybody want to spend a really boring weekend with me?

The EVO's are still the only 1TB mSATA drive, so not a lot of choices.

Re:Yay

[Ingenium13]

Is the update that rewrites the data going to be a problem on a LUKS encrypted volume? From what I saw it looks like it only supports NTFS? I also have an NTFS partition on the drive though. I guess I'm just concerned about it borking the LUKS partition.

I hadn't heard about the original firmware update but was wondering why my read performance had gotten so much worse over time. Here I was blaming it on btrfs...

Re:Yay

[bemymonkey]

Is there a specific reason you're usuing a RAID controller with mSATA sockets instead of plain old SATA drives? Is this a uSFF system or something?

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

When you bought your Samsung SSDs you should have known they only support Windows. All their shitty fucking awful firmware tools since the dawn of time have only run on Windows, it's not exactly news. Not to mention their phones need ODIN which is Windows only. It's a clusterfuck from hell when you go to bed with Samsung and Microsoft.

Re:Yay

[wolrahnaes]

Not to mention their phones need ODIN which is Windows only. It's a clusterfuck from hell when you go to bed with Samsung and Microsoft.

They don't *need* Odin for anything normal people do, we're not even supposed to have Odin available to the public. That said Heimdall is open source, cross platform, and in my experience works better than Odin. Even on Windows it's a better tool IMO.

Re:Yay

[goarilla]

Their first fix came out as a windows program and later as a live cd. The Windows program used free ntfs space to shuffle data around.
The live cd did not need a NTFS system and it did not eat my data. (ext4 + LVM2 + md-raid)
I suspect this fix will get a corresponding live cd as well, so we'll just have to wait a little bit longer.

Re:Yay

[Ingenium13]

Thanks for the info. I was contemplating booting into Windows to run the fix, but it sounds like I might be better off using the live CD. I hadn't run the initial fix, so I'm debating if it's worth it to run it now and then run it again later when they release this fix, or just wait for the new fix.

Samsung sucks on after market support

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder, if they have fixed the bricking issue with 850 Pro drives? My colleague tried to update the firmware on it, but the upgrade bricked the drive and it could not be detected by the laptop anymore. Samsung declined from knowledge of such problem, but they silently removed the firmware update from their website. Eventually the drive could be fixed by having another drive and by replacing it withe the faulty one during the firmware update procedure.

Raises a point about tech reviews

[RogueyWon]

I shifted to an SSD for my OS and core applications (plus a few disk-speed sensitive games - a fast-growing category) last year. I'd been planning to buy the 500gb 840 EVO, but, by some small miracle, Amazon had a special on the 840 Pro on the weekend I made my purchase, putting its price very close to the EVO, so I bought that instead. The 840 Pro is apparently not affected by this. Phew, bullet dodged.

But it's interesting that the issue is picked up in so few reviews. Indeed, there's a veiled apology for this in an ExtremeTech article about the bug from October. Reviews are generally carried out on the basis of a short but intensive testing period and hence don't pick up serious issues that take a bit of time to show up.

That's obviously been particularly important in this case, due to the specific nature of this bug. But when it comes to expensive bits of hardware like SSDs and high-end graphics cards, I'd be interested in reviews which came out a bit later but gave a better reflection of failure rates and longer-term issues. I've been stung before by buying a well-reviewed graphics card which turned out to have a horrible failure rate over time.

Re:Raises a point about tech reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, most of the sites that do reviews survive thanks to their readers. Which means they can't afford to wait 6 months after product release to publish. By that time, most of their competition has taken their views.

Re:Raises a point about tech reviews

[RogueyWon]

Indeed - but what I'd like to see would be somewhere that does something like a "six-months-on re-review". I suspect that for a few big-name products, impressions of hardware that people have been living with for 6 months will be very different to out-of-the-box impressions.

Re:Raises a point about tech reviews

[Bob the Super Hamste]

So sort of like the Car and Drive Long term road tests.

Re:Raises a point about tech reviews

[kimvette]

> But when it comes to expensive bits of hardware like SSDs and high-end graphics cards, I'd be interested in reviews which came out a bit later but gave a better reflection of failure rates and longer-term issues. I've been stung before by buying a well-reviewed graphics card which turned out to have a horrible failure rate over time.

You may very well be waiting for the product to go EOL and be superseded by a new model. In technology that is the ongoing story....

Re:Raises a point about tech reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe this might answer some of those post-six month questions http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

leakage? fix = reallocation maintenance?

[MessyBlob]

[warning: armchair comment] Looks like a leakage problem, degrading the cells, so reads must be retried sub-optimally. The fix would be for the drive to re-write/re-allocate old cells, which could become a maintenance task that does not noticeably degrade live performance nor lifespan. However, this does limit the drive's use as a portable or offline drive, where this maintenance cannot be performed routinely.

More like

[justthinkit]

With SSDs it is more like: Fast / Cheap / Reliable (pick two).

Samsung delivers the best reliability (for sample size of one anyway) and is acceptably priced. It also appeared to be one of the fastest but this bug has proved it otherwise.

So, if they can fix this performance bug they might just be all three.

Re:More like

[Anonymous Coward]

A little bit like the CAP- Theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

Consumer Mandate

[ThatsNotPudding]

This is a fantasy that will never happen in the US, but might in the EU: require computer hardware manufacturers and those that sell said merchandise to clearly and explicitly state the Revision Level of the actual piece being offered for sale, and what changed in the new revision. A lot of these folks treat that info like the family jewels, with no way of knowing what version you will end up with until it is actually in your hands. Why? So they don't have to recall / scrap / take a bath on the Rev 0 crap that is already in the pipeline that they know has issues, as evidenced by them moving on the Rev 1.

Re:Consumer Mandate

[thegarbz]

as evidenced by them moving on the Rev 1.

That's not evidence. It's like saying any new product release is an indication that the old one is faulty, it isn't. Nearly all revision updates are the result of either a cheaper way of producing something, or a subtle change in the system due to something like a part supplier not pulling their weight, or a cheaper part becoming available.

Re:Consumer Mandate

[Anonymous Coward]

So they don't have to recall / scrap / take a bath on the Rev 0 crap that is already in the pipeline that they know has issues, as evidenced by them moving on the Rev 1.

Er, yeah. Turns out if you work in a complex market with razor-thin margins that requires manufacturing of 100,000s of units to get the economies of scale, you can't afford to just dump 20,000 old units because you came up with a marginally improved design for the next manufacturing run.

Your consumer mandate trivially results in everything costing twice as much. In return, the odd story here and there about the odd product not living up to its hype goes away. That's a win, is it?

Just buy Crucial or Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

And have it just work.

Re:Just buy Crucial or Intel

[jez9999]

Yup, I almost always go with Intel for my SSDs now. Not sure what I'm going to go to replace my 1TB Seagate backup drive, though; I don't know whether there are any SSDs that big that are of decent quality and affordable.

Re:Just buy Crucial or Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you replace it?

Re:Just buy Crucial or Intel

[goarilla]

But Intel does something awful when you reach the wear leveling limit. After a power cycle it closes your drive !

Re:Just buy Crucial or Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

My first SSD was indeed an Intel 1.8 inch 80GB one. It 'just worked', very nicely, until it didn't with no warning at all. Just ate all the data.

Reformat, reinstall from backup, everything 'just works' again. Until it doesn't...

Repeat twice, bin the piece of Intel crap in the end.

Put me right off SSDs for a couple of years.

That said, my next one will probably be a Crucial 500GB drive. I've heard good things about them.

Fuck Samsung TLC

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Forget the 840 EVO users, what about the plain old vanilla 840 TLC users? Jury's still out on the 850 EVO I suppose. Now their Pro line is great and is all I will use.

Wrong.

[nuckfuts]

When you bought your Samsung SSDs you should have known they only support Windows. All their shitty fucking awful firmware tools since the dawn of time have only run on Windows...

If you bothered to look at their download site, you'd see they support Mac in addition to Windows.