Samsung 840 Pro -- Owners Report

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Got 2 of them, both working so far. Will see for how long :rolleyes:
 
That is bad news. I assume all four of them are completely unresponsive now? Not detected by the BIOS or anything?

Did you happen to open any of them up? One theory is that the power circuit is failing.

Will you be returning them to Samsung directly, or going through a reseller for the RMA?

Yeah, they are all bricks now, don't post to either the Areca or just a regular motherboard SATA port. These came as advance release versions from a Distributor (we weren't NDA'd though) , so they will go right back to them. Since these are <30 days old I don't want to break a seal and risk having a problem with the warranty or our advanced test rights just to look inside.
 
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I know it mentioned, it had 2 lines at the end in small font.

I said did it display a big warning?

No, you said "maybe I missed that? if so apologies. I am talking of the original article tho before the replacement failure, was that warning there then? "

You didn't say anything about a BIG warning. The initial article mentioned the initial failure. The addendum line updating mentioned the replacement failure. There was no "big" warning, just the text that I reposted.
 
Thanks for your feedback, can you let us know what was the firmware number of these 840 Pro ? Thanks

I'll check when I get back in the office on Tuesday. I didn't remember off the top of my head but I do remember they were all the same version and that Samsung Magician didn't see any updates it could find.
 
Just got my 128gb but think i should have went with the 256gb.
What you think is better for the running the os and apps cs6 vegas ext
two 128gb or one 256gb?
 
Yeah, they are all bricks now, don't post to either the Areca or just a regular motherboard SATA port. These came as advance release versions from a Distributor (we weren't NDA'd though) , so they will go right back to them. Since these are <30 days old I don't want to break a seal and risk having a problem with the warranty or our advanced test rights just to look inside.

Perhaps you got an older firmware than retail drive, it will be interesting to check that

" Samsung is claiming that the issue is a firmware bug and they already have a fix for it (supposedly no retail drive should have shipped with the broken firmware). We'll be getting samples with the new firmware soon. "
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34254866&postcount=131
 
Perhaps you got an older firmware than retail drive, it will be interesting to check that

" Samsung is claiming that the issue is a firmware bug and they already have a fix for it (supposedly no retail drive should have shipped with the broken firmware). We'll be getting samples with the new firmware soon. "
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34254866&postcount=131

Well, I popped into the office today to do work on something and took a look at the drives. Unfortunately, there is nothing on the label (I miss that where HDD's used to have it) which had the initial firmware printed and these 4 are bricks, so I can't say for sure which fw rev they had. I would tend to believe that since there was a known issue with early drives and that all 4 of ours failed in essentially the same way that we had the oldest of the firmware releases.
 
Well, I popped into the office today to do work on something and took a look at the drives. Unfortunately, there is nothing on the label (I miss that where HDD's used to have it) which had the initial firmware printed and these 4 are bricks, so I can't say for sure which fw rev they had. I would tend to believe that since there was a known issue with early drives and that all 4 of ours failed in essentially the same way that we had the oldest of the firmware releases.

Hi, you can use the following method if you have one system where you had the drive installed, and that you have not wiped:
Download & run this BAT file: http://hem.spray.se/hanzzzon/HiddenDevicesDeviceManager.zip
It will open your systems Device Manager.
Next press "View > Show Hidden Devices"
This will show your systems current devices but also any old devices you have had attached to your system, as you can see in this picture that becomes allot of devices after a few years of use. :)

For example I have two "Intel G3" SSD devices, one is with firmware: 4PC10302
The other is with firmware: 4PC10362

This is thus the same Intel SSD 320 that I upgraded from 4PC10302 > 4PC10362
This upgrade makes Windows detect it as a new drive and thus both are saved in the Device Manager...
 
Hi, you can use the following method if you have one system where you had the drive installed, and that you have not wiped:

Good idea.

I'm not sure what OS his test machine was running. If it is linux rather than Windows, I noticed that my kernel log did catch the 840 Pro firmware version:

Code:
ATA-9: Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series, DXM03B0Q, max UDMA/133
 
Good idea.

I'm not sure what OS his test machine was running. If it is linux rather than Windows, I noticed that my kernel log did catch the 840 Pro firmware version:

Code:
ATA-9: Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series, DXM03B0Q, max UDMA/133

Ok, I went back in the kernel log on the box that we do the dvt for ssd's on, the 840's were DXM02B0Q. I also now have a pair of retail drives I am going to throw on the box and start testing.
 
Well that was a close call. All the broken drives were not retail, had no label, and had a known bad firmware? Crap. Can we please stick to retail failures from here on out?

No retail failures yet, right?
 
You are running tests on your active OS drive. That colors everything depending on what the system is doing when benchmarking. If you want to match benchmarks like you see online, secure erase the drive and test it when booted off another drive for the OS.

Not really, all he has to do is tun off everything, including AV/network etc and use fixed CPU clock during the benchmarks.
 
Had mine running great for what a week now...never an issue for me. To many tin foil hat dummies rating these drives, and not enough real world owners like ME ;) nah... you what I mean :) Really wish stupid people didn't exist.

Anyhow thought I'd post the differences between my 7200 RPM 1 TB 32MB cache Hitachi Deskstar, and my new main drive THE Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD. Same mobo same CPU same SATA port. This is what kind of difference a SSD can make over a 7200RPM drive if anyone was like me and still used traditional HD on a platter. A 7200 RPM drive is just a really bad bonkers bottleneck to any system. Real.

 
^^ that's great for benchmarking but could you eloborate on real time performance...How is navigating the operating system and opening internet explorer, etc. 2 me, that is what I really care about...Synthetic bmarks are kewl, but if i'm spending $$, I want to see a difference in usage....
 
I've been using the 840 Pro for almost a week now. Very impressive SSD.

Prior to this I was using a Revo 3 X2 and this is actually faster in real world use.

Rock solid, not a single issue or BSOD. Mine has the retail firmware and I highly recommend this drive.
 
^^ that's great for benchmarking but could you eloborate on real time performance...How is navigating the operating system and opening internet explorer, etc. 2 me, that is what I really care about...Synthetic bmarks are kewl, but if i'm spending $$, I want to see a difference in usage....

Your bottle-necked in everything Mr. Corpsman. CPU, GPU, Browser, Games, Virus/Malware/Spyware scans, boot up shut down, launching any application will be shorter you name it, it's slower without a quality SSD like the 840 Pro. Even Farmville feels faster :D Think every action on your PC will take at least 2 seconds longer/slower to do all the way to many minutes slower. You bought a 2600k I think you can afford a 840 pro...sheesh your bottle-necking your CPU as it is if you don't get one.
 
we do NOT care about sequential bullshit.

Please paste up some IOPS numbers and we'll be impressed or depressed hah
 
I couldn't wait. I had to pull the trigger on the $256 dollar deal for a 256 GB drive. I'll post results some time next week. It doesn't arrive til Monday anyway. Wish me luck. Going from a spinning drive forever to a new SSD.

Please send me a good drive, Samsung! Crossing fingers here.

And a free Assassins Creed game? Sweet.
 
^^ that's great for benchmarking but could you eloborate on real time performance...How is navigating the operating system and opening internet explorer, etc. 2 me, that is what I really care about...Synthetic bmarks are kewl, but if i'm spending $$, I want to see a difference in usage....

real use none to any difference between ssd´s.
if you dont have one you missed out on the biggest and best upgrade ever.
 
real use none to any difference between ssd´s.

You are obviously a light-use case. I actually use my storage. I beat the hell out of it at home and at work. There's a huge difference between SSDs and single/R0 SSD setups. All depends on usage. For a casual user, yeah, there's little difference.
 
You are obviously a light-use case. I actually use my storage. I beat the hell out of it at home and at work. There's a huge difference between SSDs and single/R0 SSD setups. All depends on usage. For a casual user, yeah, there's little difference.

What are you doing at work? I have a lowly 128GB M4 in my workstation and a 512GB version on my laptop. I'm amazed at how much abuse the 128GB has taken with no perceivable slow down. I had a Vertex 2 and when that thing slowed I could definitely notice.
 
real use none to any difference between ssd´s.
if you dont have one you missed out on the biggest and best upgrade ever.

Well the difference between an older vertex 2 and a brand new drive might be noticeable but only under heavy use transferring large files. For the average user I agree with you.

Buying a SSD was probably the best decision I made when I built my computer. I love loading fast especially in games like BF3 and Skyrim and it is quite obvious who has a SSD in games like SC2. The difference between my work system (similar CPU power with no dedicated GPU) and my home system is a gulf in terms of actual interaction. Every single thing I do on my home computer is faster.
 
Really curious to see the reliability of these babies, I'm going to grab one, since it's the new speed king but I'm deciding when :/
 
Just installed mine last night and it's been working flawlessly since, no problems here. I guess it came with the latest firmware, because when i tried to search for newest firmware using the magician it told me mine was up to date. So all is good...
 
I'm planning to buy an 840 Pro 512 GB to replace an SSD array I'll be moving to other systems. I've read the issues noted here and hope that Samsung has the problems worked out.

Right now Amazon doesn't have this drive in stock and NewEgg says they won't have any for a few days. Amazon does have some third party sellers with drives in stock. Do you think I should wait until NewEgg or Amazon has some in (figuring those will be the newest items) or are the third party sellers on Amazon probably OK?
 
Personally if it were me I'd wait as amazon delivery > 3rd-party unless Amazon does fulfillment in which case I get whichever is cheapest :D since you can deal with amazon for issues.
 
Well...as I'm about to restart our iSer (iSCSI over RDMA) over 40Gbps Infiniband (~3200MB/s) testing I ordered EIGHT of these drives today along with another Supermicro SC847 6Gbps JBOD chassis. Figured I'd use these try try to generate 4000MB/s of IO and to try to saturate IB and then use them for ZFS L2ARCs later.

Stay tuned....hopefully I'll be melting some SAS cables.
 
Anyone know what version the retail firmware ended up being and if any retail disks died?
 
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