Samsung EVO SSD Debacle

[xpander]

Originally Posted by JHughes

If you can't handle an SSD then you shouldn't be spending the money on one since HDDs are so much more reliable. (Tell that to the three HDDs I just threw in the trash.)

And I'm pretty sure a slow SSD is still faster than a fast HDD.

You're right if your HDDs read speed is less than 17 MB/s. Even my age old HDDs will run circles around that blindfolded and their platters tied to back.

Surely HDDs have problems too. But they also have some history behind them so we know how to handle them by now (?). Knock the wood, but I've never lost a HDD, except tossing them away when they got too small, slow and noisy. Yet all this was about problems on both sides. Generally speaking, I agree, SSDs are faster and they (or something similar?) is the inevitable future. Can't unfortunately rely on HDDs much longer either, their golder years are fading.

[lachrimae]

Here's some first hand data....

Sept 26th 2014
840 Evo before firmware update | Avg read speed 32MB/s
https://i.imgur.com/riGB3J5.png

Sept 29th 2014
840 Evo after firmware update | Avg read speed 397MB/s
https://i.imgur.com/GM1gWcF.png

Feb. 3rd 2015
840 Evo untouched since the firmware update (no diskfresh etc) | Avg read speed 385MB/s
https://i.imgur.com/8ut8lTq.png

My 850 Pro tested at 385MB/s last September and 373MB/s today.

I'm all for sharing valid concerns and warning fellow musicians about issues but IMO the data retention and performance degradation concerns are not (scientifically) documented as fact, so they shouldn't be treated as such.

Now if you have first hand data that documents these issues, please share.

[cyrano]

Originally Posted by JHughes

And I'm pretty sure a slow SSD is still faster than a fast HDD.

Nope. There are some cheaper smaller SSD's that perform a lot worse than, say a 15K rpm SAS disk.

If you compare an average SSD with an average HD, the SSD will be a lot faster. But it still depends on what you're doing. If you need to record video@4K, not all SSD's are equal. Some might not even work.

And HD's haven't been doin' so good lately, with the 3 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 scoring over 40% failures:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

I see Samsung at least trying to fix things. Seagate isn't even replying to requests for comments.

[chucky5p]

Originally Posted by chas51

I just ran DiskFresh on my mSATA SSD.
I did not check the box that says read only.
did I just ruin my SSD?

Don't worry, running DiskFresh a single time will "use" only 1 erase cycle out of at least 800 erase cycles available in the case of the EVO 840 (and much less for other types of SSDs) Or to look at it differently, you have only "used" about .1% of your SSD capacity. There's plenty left It's only by continuously and repeatedly using tools like DiskFresh that you can damage an SSD. If you do it sparingly, say 4 times per year, it would take more than 200 years before ruining your SSD (for TLC drives like the EVO 840) and many thousands of years for other types of SSDs!

Chuck

[Win Conway]

Originally Posted by cyrano

If you need to record video@4K, not all SSD's are equal. Some might not even work.

Statements like this are entirely usesless, 4k video can be recorded in all sorts of formats, SSD would easily handle ProRes 4k for instance (generalising here because even though there are lots of ProRes rates, SSD easily handles them all)

[chas51]

Originally Posted by chucky5p

Don't worry, running DiskFresh a single time will "use" only 1 erase cycle out of at least 800 erase cycles available in the case of the EVO 840 (and much less for other types of SSDs) Or to look at it differently, you have only "used" about .1% of your SSD capacity. There's plenty left It's only by continuously and repeatedly using tools like DiskFresh that you can damage an SSD. If you do it sparingly, say 4 times per year, it would take more than 200 years before ruining your SSD (for TLC drives like the EVO 840) and many thousands of years for other types of SSDs!

Chuck

thank you very much Chuck.
my SSD is a Plextor mSATA M5M 256 GB. I installed it last year in my HP Envy notebook.
super grateful for your reply here.
also thank you so much for all of your excellent posts about SSD's.
I'm using DiskFresh right now on my laptop's HDD, and on my old desktops HDD's.
awesome, man.
thinking this will improve all of the above.

[chucky5p]

Originally Posted by cyrano

...And HD's haven't been doin' so good lately, with the 3 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 scoring over 40% failures:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

I see Samsung at least trying to fix things. Seagate isn't even replying to requests for comments.

Totally agree. There was a time where HDs were way more reliable than today. I believe it's due to two main factors: 1)super cheap mass production with very little quality control due to manufacturer's lower profit margin compared with say 10 years ago. 2)very hight bit density magnetic design fast approaching theoretical limit of how many bytes can be "crammed" per HD plater (with current magnetic head design). The more bits you have per sq/in, the more error prone the reading/writing becomes.

BTW, thanks for the link. The more information we have, the better choice we can make regarding what to buy or not buy... I guess there won't be a Seagate HD in my near future, their stats are pretty bad ATM

Chuck

[chucky5p]

Originally Posted by lachrimae

I'm all for sharing valid concerns and warning fellow musicians about issues but IMO the data retention and performance degradation concerns are not (scientifically) documented as fact, so they shouldn't be treated as such.

Now if you have first hand data that documents these issues, please share.

I understand your concern and I agree we shouldn't succumb to irrational and/or unfounded FUD. That is why I provided some links to engineering papers by experts in the field working for main SSD manufacturers (such as Micron) These papers' content are the closest you can get to current scientific knowledge on SSDs ATM. And they all show that there are real differences between each cell type regarding data retention and performance degradation. Just read them thoroughly and you'll see. I can supply you with more sources if you want.

A for first hand data and experience with the 840 EVO, I can't share mine because I didn't buy the 840 EVO when it came out since I was already aware of the "potential" increase of issues of TLC SSDs compared with SLC/MLC SSDs, and although Samsung was saying that they had managed to minimize these issues, I simply didn't want to take the chance.

Note that I said "potential" increase of issues. For many users, they've never experienced ANY issues with their 840/840 EVO and also for many users that did have issues, the October 15 2014 firmware from Samsung did fix permanently their issues (like in your case) However, there remain many users that still have issues and even worse for those "plain" 840 users that have issues and haven't received any answers/solution from Samsung.

BTW, if you want to read about their "first hand data that documents these issues" you can read them here

Samsung 840 EVO read speed drops on old-written data in the drive (184 page thread - and counting!):
http://www.overclock.net/t/1507897/s...a-in-the-drive

And "plain" 840 users: The We Want our 840 NON EVO SSD fixed also:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1519058/t...ssd-fixed-also

As for me, I think I've spent more than enough time on this subject. Time to move on to better things, like checking the latest Reaper Beta

Chuck

[Omarkum]

What do you consider to be a proven SSD Chucky?

[serr]

My 240GB 840 Pro is still as fast as day one. (Hmmm... Guess that's why I bought the 'Pro' )

My older 120GB OCZ is also just as fast as day one. And not quite the performance of the newer Samsung. While we're at it, my 6 year old Wintec 128GB express34 SSD is just as fast as it ever was. (Of course the newer 840 is more than twice the performance. Remember when these were only $200 when standard 120GB SSD's were going for $500 though?)

Lost two 2TB HDD's last week. One WD black and a cheaper WD USB only external. Now I'm not going to go off the deep end the other way and claim that "HDD's always fail and SSD's are perfect." The reality is I've only owned 3 SSD's in personal machines so far and haven;t had the opportunity to have a failure yet. And for the record, I still have a couple PATA 750GB drives in an old firewire 400 bay that just like to keep working.

At any rate, there's no reason to avoid SSD's and every performance reason to use them. Even the old Wintec is faster than HDD speeds.

[JHughes]

I have a failed WD Black here that I'm going to check before trashing. The other three drives I trashed were all Seagate.

My Samsung SSD has been configured with 10% overprovisioning so I feel pretty secure.

Originally Posted by serr

At any rate, there's no reason to avoid SSD's and every performance reason to use them. Even the old Wintec is faster than HDD speeds.

Indeed.

[chas51]

my HDD that just bought the farm (in my Sony Vaio), is a Seagate.
talked to the guy who fixed my Looper.
he said the same thing happened to him.

[JHughes]

For my replacement/upgrade, I bit the bullet and went Hitachi for my storage drive. Expensive. AND, Hitachi is now owned by WD, so who knows if I paid Hitachi prices for WD reliability.

I already mentioned the 840 EVO for my system drive.

And finally, I bought Hard Disk Sentinel: http://www.hdsentinel.com/ on excellent sale, so I won't get taken by surprise again.

My next build is in the planning stages at: http://pcpartpicker.com/.
I'm excited about M2 drives and USB 3.1. M2 drives are available now and I want one. The latest SSD drives all use RAM for a cache if you tell them to and it makes a difference, but only on second access. For the true high-speed random-access experience you need M2 or better. These are good times as the final and longest standing speed bottleneck is being addressed. Which leads to me wanting a faster CPU and more RAM. It's been a long time since there's been a compelling need to upgrade (2007 or so), but that time is almost here for me. Windows 10 and DX12 will clinch it, along with the GeForce 750Ti which runs almost silently.

[Rusty Falcon]

Thanks chuck for the detailed technical information. You've helped me be more aware of the issues with my 840 EVO SSDs. I'll definitely be keeping them backed up and will periodically use DiskFresh.

[cyrano]

Originally Posted by gpunk_w

Statements like this are entirely usesless, 4k video can be recorded in all sorts of formats, SSD would easily handle ProRes 4k for instance (generalising here because even though there are lots of ProRes rates, SSD easily handles them all)

I handle quite a bit of disks used for video. I can assure you if you buy an average sample of today's SSD offerings, some won't be able to record video for longer than an hour.

Top of the line Samsung, Intel and a large number of others will do fine. But some just won't keep up with a steady data stream for a long time. They need to do some sort of disk management and will simply stop recording, or cause dropouts. And that's the same with all applications of that kind of memory. Some brands/models don't work.

With harddisks, people seemed to get a feeling if things were to fail. Usually that came from audible feedback and changing waiting times. Both are gone with SSD's, so failure comes unexpected, also because a lot of people seem to think they last forever.

And another difference is, harddisks usually can be recovered. SSD's that failed usually can't.

[JHughes]

Also see: http://techreport.com/review/27436/t...king-petabytes

[heda]

recent news. it seems Samsung still investigating, since some users still have slowdowns in the EVO840 even having applied the restoration tool. It seems it happens if you don't use the drive for some time.

[ivansc]

So glad I bought the 850 EVO.

I have wiped mine and swapped operating systems on it three times now. NO sign of any problems ad the thing is still blindingly fast.
Oh - and all four of my black WDs are fine, even after eight years on the oldest one!

There again mine dont run 24/7 and I generally spend time with them, petting them and telling them how much I appreciate them.

Now my keyboard on the other hand gets seven shades of shit beaten out of it every day and repays me by wearing out every six months!