Samsung 840 EVO read speeds found to degrade on old data

[Arthur]

The latest version of Samsung Magician (v4.6) can be downloaded from here. Bootable firmware ISOs are now available too.

 

Samsung Releases Second 840 EVO Performance Fix

 

Ultimately Samsung’s second fix is a bit of a brute force solution to the problem, but at this point there doesn’t seem to be anything Samsung can do about 19nm TLC cell charge decay other than to refresh the data, as the problem is intrinsic to the NAND itself. Pre-release versions of the firmware show that this fix works, and conceptually this is much more likely to work over the long run than Samsung’s initial fix. The tradeoff is that it does consume P/E cycles to refresh the data, but by our own calculations even 5 years of refreshes at 1/week would only be 26% of the drive’s rated 1000 cycle lifetime. Meanwhile for the longer term, Samsung has since moved on to 3D-VNAND in newer drives, which is more stable than very small geometry planar NAND and essentially turns back the clock on NAND scaling issues. So the 840 EVO should be the last Samsung TLC drive to encounter this issue.

 

In any case, after previewing the updated firmware to the press, Samsung has released the updated firmware and its associated version of Samsung Magician (version 4.6) to the public over on their website. After an initial staggered release over the weekend – we suspect to make sure not too many users had the firmware if a problem quickly cropped up – Samsung looks to have opened downloads to everyone. However Mac and Linux users will want to note that at this time only the Magician version of the firmware has been released; the bootable ISOs for directly updating the drive have yet to be updated.

 

http://vgy.me/1IZmCb.png

Edited April 28, 2015 by Arthur

[Andycat]

We have 90 x HP 450 G2's with the PM851 drive in. HP have never released a firmware update, and we're currently arguing with them as the laptops have 31 months warranty still left.

 

The drives pass a hard drive test, but have slow read speeds and won't save to network locations etc because of it.

 

We're getting nowhere...