Firmware Update to Fix the Samsung SSD 840 EVO Read Performance Bug Coming on October 15th

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• xwingman - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link

  man - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
  When the firmware update fix becomes available will I need to reformat my drive and os then apply the fix? I tried doing an update a year ago with a kingston hyper ssd and it kept blue screening.
  
  I will be using this as a primary os drive or do you guys have any other options for a os ssd that won't need a fix at the moment?

• Kristian Vättö - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link

  It is not known yet whether the update will be destructive. However, if you are buying an SSD now and your usage pretty average (no VMs or other IO heavy activity), you should just go with the MX100 since it is cheaper too.

• gravothermal - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link

  Are there any other SSD that come in a 1 TB mSATA for factor? I was about to hit the buy button on the EVO 840 mSATA 1TB but this has me worried. I suspend/resume VMs often and it makes me think that the longevity won't be very good if I'm buying for the long term.

• gravothermal - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link

  Just to clarify, my worry is that whatever fix Samsung issues will be based on reshuffling data around a lot, hence eroding the already substandard life of the TLC setup.

• Romberry - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

  Substandard is an overstatement. TLC doesn't have the endurance of MLC, but for most users -- as the vast, vast majority -- it has plenty and then some.

• gravothermal - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

  Yes but I suspend/resume 3GB VMs on a daily basis. That's doesn't fall within the "most users" category.
  
  I'm not looking to restock some CEO's webbrowsing box. This is for getting work done.
  
  Before, I could calculate whether TLC met my needs based on the total throughput expected. Now, with some stealth firmware silently wearing down the SSD in the background to prevent this bug, I can't.
  
  And I don't get why the media are so RAH RAH RAH about TLC. I mean put some SLC lipstick on a pig and sell it the same price at MLC? What the? "where's the outrage"?

• Oxford Guy - Saturday, October 4, 2014 - link

  It also doesn't have MLC's lower latency or power consumption. TLC is substandard in all respects except density and cost to manufacture, just as MLC is substandard in comparison with SLC in all respects except density and cost to manufacture.

• zhenya00 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

  Thanks for reporting on this.
  
  I have several of these 840 EVO drives placed in new high-end laptops, including my own. I'd actually just begun the troubleshooting stage of trying to figure out why my i7/12gb RAM/SSD Thinkpad was so damn slow. I have the original benchmarks I'd run when I put this drive in originally and now, less than a year later, reads and writes at smaller block sizes were ~1/8 of what they were new.
  
  I refreshed the disk with DiskFresh last night and it improved things, but I'm still at 1/2-2/3 of new. If Samsung's firmware update doesn't fix this I'm going to be attempting to have these returned under warranty. This is unacceptable.
  
  Interesting that just last week when I needed a couple of new drives I chose drives from Crucial on a gut feeling...

• DesktopMan - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link

  I've had problems with Steam download speeds, and it seems totally fixed after running DiskFresh on my 840 EVO. Steam needs to verify data to update, so that's probably why it was affected by this.

• Oxford Guy - Saturday, October 4, 2014 - link

  It shouldn't affect the 840 "vanilla", I assume, because it doesn't have that fake SLC caching tech. That's most likely the source of the issue.