Samsung 840 EVO Performance Restoring Firmware Only Partially Effective

I saw this and I retested my raid0 setup. I haven't seen any drop it n speed since upgrading to the latest firmware.
 
Well shit. Bought a 500 gig 840 EVO for $180 over Christmas. Should have stayed away from TLC nand.
 
Despotes said:
I wonder if the 850 EVO has a similar issue.
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The pcper article reports that the 840 EVO problem was NAND that was miscalibrated at the factory. The 840 EVO has 19nm (or less) NAND while the 850 EVO has 40nm TLC V-NAND. It seems very hard to believe that such a miscalibration would carry over to such a completely different manufacturing method and product. 40nm is a ridiculously huge and durable process in today's terms, maybe like comparing a Humvee to a SmartCar.
 
Is the restoration program a one time deal or can it be used once every couple of months or so?
 
It doesnt work. After owning an TLC drive like the 840 Evo, I wont ever purchase another TLC based drive. MLC/Nand based drives have a FAR greater life and overall handle abuse or constant read/write scenarios. A year and half with the 840EVO 500GB its at 330/340 Rear/Write, which is 200 under what it should be.
 
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Igroock said:
It doesnt work. After owning an TLC drive like the 840 Evo, I wont ever purchase another TLC based drive. MLC/Nand based drives have a FAR greater life and overall handle abuse or constant read/write scenarios. A year and half with the 840EVO 500GB its at 330/340 Rear/Write, which is 200 under what it should be.
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Which doesn't work, the restoration program or Diskfresh?
 
Options? You download something specifically for fixing it from samsung website. No options.
 
Igroock said:
It doesnt work. After owning an TLC drive like the 840 Evo, I wont ever purchase another TLC based drive. MLC/Nand based drives have a FAR greater life and overall handle abuse or constant read/write scenarios. A year and half with the 840EVO 500GB its at 330/340 Rear/Write, which is 200 under what it should be.
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Had my 840 evo roughly the same length of time and I'm currently sitting at 539/498 which is roughly what I had day 1.
 
wdeydwondrer said:
Had my 840 evo roughly the same length of time and I'm currently sitting at 539/498 which is roughly what I had day 1.
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Run hd tune so the entire disk gets checked. The drop in performance only happens with old data. So running as ssd will not show the drop.

There is another tool that you can run to check the entire disk and it reports back with age and speed. If I can remember it I will add a link.
 
wdeydwondrer said:
Had my 840 evo roughly the same length of time and I'm currently sitting at 539/498 which is roughly what I had day 1.
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Its a faulty drive more likely, which I already sent to Samsung. I have a second 500GB 840 EVO and it sits at 532/533 which is the same age.
 
Running HD tune on my non-fixed 840 evo shows the same severe drop in performance. I've just settled on doing a monthly diskrefresh to keep it more or less viable until i upgrade to a different ssd.
 
Same problem here with my 750. Already down to 100MB/s in places.

At this point I doubt there will ever be a real fix other than constantly refreshing the entire drive like people are doing manually. It's been months and all Samsung can say is "we're looking into it." These TLC are junk.
 
trick0502 said:
Run hd tune so the entire disk gets checked. The drop in performance only happens with old data. So running as ssd will not show the drop.

There is another tool that you can run to check the entire disk and it reports back with age and speed. If I can remember it I will add a link.
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But wouldn't this add and entire drive size worth of writes to it just so you can say you know a number?

We also already knew the problem was with old data only, says that much on the Samsung site.

Are the new Samsung Evo drives made different to not be affected by this?
 
wdeydwondrer said:
But wouldn't this add and entire drive size worth of writes to it just so you can say you know a number?
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No, it reads the entire drive so you can see where it's slowing down. If you overwrote the entire drive the problem would temporarily disappear again.
 
Anyone elses' 840 EVO going a bit wacky in it's "old age"?
Checked the SMART stats on the drive over the weekend and it reports 17k power on hours. (I bought the drive on 9/20/2013, that's around 13k hours according to wolfram alpha)
It's also reporting 6.3TB in writes which strikes me as a bit high relatively. (no I don't have win defrag on, killed that off shortly after I got the thing)

Pondering just replacing the blasted thing with a 1TB BX100 and being done with it.
 
wdeydwondrer said:
My 840 evo is still fine. Haven't even run over 2 TB writes yet, so maybe that is the cause?
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It's old data that slows down. I bet if you run hd tune you will see drops to 100mb/s. Prove me wrong.

hdtune_zps5b754cc6.jpg


after_zps533e32d4.jpg


Only the first 10% of the drive is used
 
Trick, thought you reported you yourself seen no drop in speed with your first post in this thread.

And I realize it's old data only, says as much right in the tool and across every site that carried this story on the 840s.

I'll try and test it tonight though to make you happy. Have to seeing by the hospital after work first, but will if i have time.
 
wdeydwondrer said:
Trick, thought you reported you yourself seen no drop in speed with your first post in this thread.

And I realize it's old data only, says as much right in the tool and across every site that carried this story on the 840s.

I'll try and test it tonight though to make you happy. Have to seeing by the hospital after work first, but will if i have time.
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i did report no slow down. using as ssd or crystal mark you will not see it, as they only test a small portion of the drive. when i tested hd tune it was there.
 
New%2BBitmap%2BImage%2B%282%29.bmp


While not near the 500 megs Samsung showed, still consistent across the whole disc. Wonder what I've done that the ssd is averaging slow or if this amd just can't keep up, lol
 
Here's my post with pre and post fix last time:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041165605&postcount=25

And here's where I am today:


The drive is strictly a game drive and I don't do a lot of game swaps (2.25TB written). What scares me more is that my drive has already retired two sectors at such a low write amount on a large drive. Not the type of quality I expected from a Samsung drive.
 
Jeremy C said:
Here's my post with pre and post fix last time:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1041165605&postcount=25

And here's where I am today:
<images snipped>

The drive is strictly a game drive and I don't do a lot of game swaps (2.25TB written). What scares me more is that my drive has already retired two sectors at such a low write amount on a large drive. Not the type of quality I expected from a Samsung drive.
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That's basically my situation exactly. I don't have any retired sectors yet but speeds are all over the place now, not a near constant line on top like it should be.
 
Anyone find anything about a new fix for this? All I can find is that there was supposed to be on before the end of March and we're kind of beyond that now.

Honestly, though it would cost a fortune to the company, they would save a lot of headaches if they offered a replacement program or heavily discounted upgrade option to get these off the market and get people into the 850's. It sounds like the tech simply wasn't in place when these came out and we're going to run into problems as long as these drives are in use. It could give the negative image that the desktars and some Seagates had back in their days which took forever to fade away.
 
Jeremy C said:
Anyone find anything about a new fix for this? All I can find is that there was supposed to be on before the end of March and we're kind of beyond that now.

Honestly, though it would cost a fortune to the company, they would save a lot of headaches if they offered a replacement program or heavily discounted upgrade option to get these off the market and get people into the 850's. It sounds like the tech simply wasn't in place when these came out and we're going to run into problems as long as these drives are in use. It could give the negative image that the desktars and some Seagates had back in their days which took forever to fade away.
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https://techreport.com/news/28112/new-840-evo-fix-adds-periodic-refresh-to-firmware

New 840 EVO fix adds ''periodic refresh'' to firmware
by Geoff Gasior &#8212; 11:50 AM on April 14, 2015

Last year, some Samsung 840 EVO SSDs started exhibiting slower read speeds with old data. The problem was patched in October, but the fix didn't stick, with slowdowns returning months later. Samsung pledged to release another fix in March, and now, that update is scheduled for "later this month."

Since the EVO's slowdowns manifest over time, we won't be able to verify the effectiveness of the new patch right away. However, we can share some details about what the incoming fix entails. Here's what Samsung told us when we asked for specifics about how the new firmware addresses the cell voltage drift that seems largely responsible for the problem:

&#8226; Samsung revised the firmware algorithm to maintain consistency in performance for old data under exceptional circumstances. Therefore, read performance was restored without the need for Magician. This algorithm is based on a periodic refresh feature that can maintain the read performance of this older data. The algorithm does not affect normal user scenarios (i.e. occasional PC performance degradation due to background work of SSD) or the lifespan of an SSD and can actively maintain its performance without the help of Magician. However, this algorithm does not operate when the power is off.

&#8226; The read performance has been improved by the revised firmware algorithm. If performance recovery is slow in instances where the SSD did not have enough run-time for the firmware algorithm to reach normal performance levels, or similarly, had been powered off for an extended amount of time, the performance can be recovered by using the Advanced Performance Optimization feature in Magician 4.6. This is a supplementary feature to maintain normal performance for a few exceptional circumstances.

&#8226; Users can upgrade to the new firmware through Magician 4.6, without using the performance restoration tool.

Interesting. When users first encountered slowdowns with the EVO, they found that rewriting the old data brought reads back up to speed. It sounds like the new firmware's "periodic refresh feature" does something similar.

The refresh routine appears to run in the background, when the drive is idle, so it shouldn't affect performance in normal scenarios. Refreshing old data may consume some of the NAND's limited endurance, though. We've asked Samsung to clarify how frequently data needs to be refreshed and how this affects write amplification.

Since old data can only be refreshed while the drive is on, those who leave the EVO unpowered for extended periods will have to rely on the Magician software's optimization mechanism if they want to restore full performance quickly. It's unclear how long the EVO will take to optimize itself after extended downtime.
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Edit, another link from the comments of the article above:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...40-EVO-EXT0DB6Q-Firmware-Review-Finally-Fixed
 
My last 2 computers purchases were

Nvidia Gtx970 and evo 840 250gb... LOL...

Sorry for stupid question but does the size of 840 EVO drives matter?

I bought Evo 840 250gb to replace my son's HDD in his laptop 5 months ago and I after finding out about the issues I was just waiting. Now I don't even know if I should bother to swap his HDD with this faulty SSD??!?! His laptop is working just fine... What do you guys think? I cannot return this drive, and it seems like my worst SSD purchase ever... that includes still working fine OCZ Agility 3 drive I use for my steam games...

So what should I do with it? use it as steam gaming storage on my gaming htpc? Adobe Lightroom working storage? I don't think I want to use this SSD anywhere where data is important...

Thoughts?

Thanks...
 
SioPao said:
https://techreport.com/news/28112/new-840-evo-fix-adds-periodic-refresh-to-firmware

Edit, another link from the comments of the article above:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...40-EVO-EXT0DB6Q-Firmware-Review-Finally-Fixed
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I'd call that a band-aid at best. That's more them admitting they can't provide a real fix so they're just going to have the drive waste write cycles in the background. (yes I know it's negligible, however it shouldn't even be necessary)

Reaffirms my decision to never buy another Samsung SSD again if they're going to pull that crap.
 
And they offer absolutely nothing, not even this half-assed "fix", for the 840 non-EVO. Nice. I own 2 250GB models, and both of them exhibit this same problem and many others report the same issue. I sure as hell won't be buying or recommending Samsung to anyone again.
 
well i did run disc fresh and it helped some, what else can i try to restore this drive ?

i have never noticed any issues with the evo, seemed fine to me untill i ran hd tune :(

i bought a 500GB 850evo and will put the 840evo into a trash disc for downloads and what not and then retire the old corsair V128 drive from it's duties
 
Reus said:
And they offer absolutely nothing, not even this half-assed "fix", for the 840 non-EVO. Nice. I own 2 250GB models, and both of them exhibit this same problem and many others report the same issue. I sure as hell won't be buying or recommending Samsung to anyone again.
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Report your issue to Samsung, because they are playing the game of holding their hands to their ears and pretending there exists no problem:
Q: Will there be a firmware update for the other Samsung TLC-based SSD models that have also demonstrated this read performance issue? If so, which models and how soon will that firmware be made available?
A: This issue had been reported for the 840 EVO SSD only.
Source: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...40-EVO-EXT0DB6Q-Firmware-Review-Finally-Fixed
 
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