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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.
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.