Everyone knew that reliability would suffer when using Planar NAND for TLC drives, but I don't think anyone expected this many issues. This is why I didn't buy any TLC SSDs until they came equipped with 3D NAND.
It's not really a reliability issue, as in the drives aren't failing all over the place or that data is being lost. It's a performance issue on reads of "old" data. The drives still work in these situations, it's just that read speed falls back to something closer to old ATA spinning platters than to SSD or even current gen SATAII and SATAIII spinning disks.
Sequential read speeds fall back to mechanical levels from earlier in the century, but random read speeds (the ones you'll actually notice if slow) do not. My drive is affected by this, yet average random access times are still on the order of 0.15ms (as measured by gnome disk utility), 100x faster than HDD of today. I'm as yet undecided as to whether it's worth applying this fix, as performance for me is not noticeably affected, which I would guess is the case for 99% of the people moaning about this if they weren't looking for the problem.
Ιf you want to apply the fix, apply it. If you don't want to apply the fix, don't apply it. In any case, stop the QQ, you remind me of 10 year olds whining about Rogues in WoW Vanilla. Here, I even have a carebear for you.
Everyone knew and they bought them anyways, because they also knew they'd just buy a new SSD at 2x the capacity for the same price or less before TLC wear concerns became an issue.
Honestly, SSDs to me now are like expensive CD-RWs, I replace them before durability ever becomes an issue.
I updated my 4xEVO array without any problems, a little trick for those who are doing multiple, you can upgrade 1 drive's firmware, and while it is counting down from 20s, just kill Magician in your Task Tray, re-open it, and update another drive. Do that for each of your drives, then shut down, and they should all have updated np.
AT should "torture" Samsung about the vanilla 840 every time they speak with them. And if nothing happens: point out this customer care failure when ever a new Samsung product is discussed.
Still no news about any plans for an update for the mSATA 840 EVOs. It clearly suffers from the same issues, but there is no firmware update, nor a manual fix option in the latest Magician.
It seems that they have uploaded the firmware for Mac and Linux users. However, the message that rests along with the link ("Supports Advanced Performance Optimization in Magician 4.6" ) is quite misleading, in my opinion, as this software is Windows-only. Which brings me to wonder how this fix will work in Mac and Linux as Magician software is not available for this OSes,,,
You definitely have a point regarding the description of the firmware.
The answer to your question in theory at least is the firmware should work just as well. The new firmware is designed to automatically refresh (aka rewrite) old data to ensure it works at full speed. The advanced performance optimization is just a user initiated full drive rewrite. If you don't use that tool the drives firmware over time will rewrite any old data in the background.
At a guess I would say that after flashing the firmware the drive would rewrite all the data anyway so it starts from a clean slate so if you give your system a few hours of idle time after updating the firmware it should do the trick. I did run the advanced optimizer on my 120GB EVO and it took about 15 minutes.
Thanks for your comment. Another matter that bothers me is the "power cycle" request. I have this SSD in a Macbook and in every firmware update it requests me to do a power cycle after applying the update. This means that I need to unscrew the bottom of the laptop, apply the firmware update and when requested to do the power cycle carefully remove the bottom plate, release the SSD, unplug it and plug it again... But I think this is not requested in Windows. Is it really necessary?
Thanks for your comment. Surprisingly, the firmware patching process took less that 10 seconds... This figure does not match to those that the users are reporting in Windows... Maybe the process is different than with the previous firmware update where all data was writen once when applying the update...
artasom in reference to power cycling I think you are mixing up a secure erase (SE) and a firmware update. When performing an SE the drive says it is frozen and must be physically disconnected from the power while the system is on and then plugged back in before the SE can be ran. This is not required for a firmware update. After using Windows Magician to update the firmware the system automatically shuts down. Leaving it powered off for a few seconds before turning it back on is all that is required.
The new firmware does have a different process to the previous update which was a 2 stage process. The first stage was the firmware update and shut down. After powering back on the 2nd stage was to rewrite the whole drive. This time around because the firmware will rewrite the drive in the background it is not necessary to include it into the firmware update process but for Windows users they can initiate a full drive rewrite using the feature in Magician.
The actual firmware update process takes a couple of seconds. Anybody who says it takes longer in Windows is either referring to the original update or including the time to run an "Advanced Performance Optimization" as well.
A restart is NOT a power-cycle. The PSU continues to supply power to the drive through a restart. You have to shut the machine down and turn it back on. Putting it to sleep and waking it back up will also probably power-cycle the drive, which is useful for power-cycling the drive without rebooting, to unfreeze the drive's security settings when doing a secure erase, for example.
if you use it in server work loads it could be a problem (which voids the warranty an way as due to amount of data written), normal loads you should easily get 5-10 years out of it, all this fix is doing is making the SSD do what it should've been doing any way, and its Predictable reduction life as well (that trips at around 400TB you can still get about twice that before there are Problems happen)
People are being very lenient with Samsung about all this. If this was an issue with an OCZ drive, everyone would be screaming from the rooftops. Very hypocritical IMO.
does look quite good, if you leave the system on long enough it should hopefully resolve itself) you can always run the Optimiser just once so emiedalty corrects the speeds (but really going form 40mb to 300mb/s is good)
It seems that TLC NAND isn't the only type of NAND that's having a problem at process nodes of 19nm of less. The Crucial MX200 SSD which uses 16nm MLC 128Gb NAND flash chips appears to be having the same very issue that the Samsung 840 EVO had, namely NAND flash voltage drifting which causes read speed performance issues on older data.
What does this mean? Well, it means that pretty much NAND flash memory becomes unreliable as the process node shrinks past 20nm. NAND flash manufacturers have hit the wall when it comes to planar NAND. From this point on the only way to make NAND flash reliable is to reverse the process node shrinkage and go to 3D-NAND where NAND cells are stacked on one another instead of laid out flat.
Samsung started this trend in which they released their 3D-VNAND and reversed the process shrinkage to 40nm with their 850 line of SSDs. Other manufacturers are also doing the same with their own approach to 3D-NAND. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that NAND flash memory manufacturers have hit the wall in terms of shrinking NAND and that as you shrink the process node the NAND has far more of a chance of voltage drifting that can effect read speed performance as the data ages.
I wouldn't go near Crucial's MX series. Their MX100 has serious firmware problems which they still haven't been able to fix and the MX200 is also borked. Their firmware dev team are a joke.
I have one myself, I'm lucky I'm still within the 30-day return policy at Amazon.com. I already have another SSD on the way today and I'm shipping the piece of crap MX200 back to them for a full refund.
Random BSODs caused by the MX100 dropping off the SATA channel. Read up on the Crucial forums.
The fact that they released the MX200 quickly after the release of the original MX100 should tell you something, the MX100 is seriously broken and no amount of firmware fixes will fix the issue with MX100. They should be refunding those people who bought the MX100.
I purchased (2) 256GB MX100 drives (Fall of 2014) and always wondered why the BX100 & MX200 series came out, within 6 months of the MX100 availability. Just as Crucial finally introduced a SSD management tool (e.g. Storage Executive Client is a joke), I chose a Samsung 850 EVO for my next build. Although I knew of the 840 EVO 'old data' issue, their Magician software tool, 3D V-NAND flash memory w/ increased geometry and 5 year warranty were deciding factors.
Although, fingers crossed, my MX100 installs, both in Win 7 laptops have been trouble free, I now see that others have had numerous issues with stability, power supply and NCQ trim. As a result, there has been a new firmware (MU02) release to fix these and other problems.
However, after reading of so many problems with this update within their user community, I decided not to apply the update at this time.
Has anyone managed to successfully update the firmware via bootable USB? i.e. copy the files from the ISO file to a bootable USB, boot from the USB and apply the firmware update?
I read through the thread and they tried switching to discard instead of fstrim. They still got data corruption. It sounds like TRIM is thoroughly broken, at least on their particular drive. Hopefully it's just an isolated case of faulty hardware.
Samsung's history with flash memory and TRIM/DISCARD is NOT good. Remember all those dead S2s, Notes, S3s, Note 2s, etc caused by their buggy eMMC firmware? I wouldn't touch a device with NAND flash which Samsung have been near with a bargepole these days.
I just installed Samsung Magician 4.6 and upgraded the firmware and ran the optimization - for 30 minutes. Then for fun I ran the optimization again - another 30 minutes. It is scary that the optimization needs another 30 minutes of optimization.
How to update your drive's firmware (no CD/DVD drive needed, Win 7, 1X840 EVO AHCI):
1. If RAPID mode is set to enabled, set it to disable and follow the instructions (reboot). 2. After reboot, install Samsung Magician 4.6. Follow instructions (reboot). 3. After Samsung Magician 4.6 has been successfully installed, open Samsung Magician, click on FIRMWARE UPDATE, click download, and click INSTALL. PC will reboot and the firmware will be updated automatically.
I'm using rapid storage (50gb as cache for my main hdd). But there are some features like the firmware update that are disable. Does featurea are disabled because i have the cache enable or because i have RAID mode set in the bios? To use ssd as cache i need to have the storage mode set to raid instead of ahci, righ?
Linux users beware, discard and fstrim fail with this brilliant upgrade. OK fstrim, kinda depends on kernel version, but discard may make your disk unmountable. Bravo Samsung, way to go!
It definitely got worse for me. My Linux (4.0 kernel) times out regularly. Write-up on my blog @ http://bit.ly/1DN2XUM with some performance numbers and errors.
My / and /home filesystems are mounted with "discard". I'll see if calms down in the next few days otherwise I'll try dropping discard. Sigh, this looks more like a regression. Worked flawlessly before the update from EXT0AB0Q to EXT0DB6Q.
I'm using my Evo in RAID mode, 50gb as cache for my system (rapid storage) and 70gb as regular partition. But i can't access ssd features such as firmware update and performance restoration because of the RAID mode set in the bios. (instead of AHCI). What am i supposted to do? Since i can't use the software, will it work just update firmware? (in another computer wich is using ahci mode) How could i test my drive? (crystal disk mark will not test older data, right?)
Hi: Anyone experience 840 Pro firmware issue under raid controller? we have 6 x 840 Pro 512GB running under Dell PowerEdge 720 with H710 controller as raid1, scores around 400MB/s sequential 4K write constantly over past year until last month, we upgraded 2 x SSD firmware from DXM05B0Q to DXM06B0Q and the sequential 4K write speed dropped dramatically from 400MB/s to fluctuation of 20-200MB/s in the same hardware. We thought it might be our hardware, so we moved the two different firmware version SSD to another PowerEdge, (as 2 x raid0), as yield same result. We have been talking to Samsung helpdesk who has been nice but unhelpful, It seems to me this is a firmware bug. BTW, if we plug the old and new version of SSD back to a desktop with a SATA3 connector, re-do the 4K write test, it is constantly lower on new firmware but not much, something like 390MB/s vs 420MB/s
Here is the command we use to test with a 20GB test file, we even re-format the drive and tested as empty drive, still same result
Thank you for this article. I've been reading this site for years, but never felt as compelled to say thanks before. Thank you for updating me on this issue. I have the 840 EVO. Last month after your first article on this drive, I took the plunge and removed my 1TB 840 EVO out of my PS4 and did the performance restoration tool kit on it. I haven't even finished installing my digital games on it yet (downloaded somewhere in the region of 800GB's this month on to it.) And now I must go and do it all over again. I'm glad I read this site :)
My PlayStation Now Beta has gone mental in the last 48 hours, locking me out of games and apps, even taking my PlayStation Plus away. Thankfully it is not to do with this, and the only way I'm going to get my PlayStation 4 working again is to wait for the new Firmware that fix's it according to Sony support - So I wont be using it for several weeks anyway.
I just wanted to say thank you. Kind regards Richard
Wow, some seriously spoiled brats and naysayers on here.
Most people wouldn't know there was an "issue", because it's not an issue. It's only an issue to the "I told you so" people who need to be "right" about something.
I've got one. I am not even the slightest bit concerned, nor have I noticed an "issue".
What I do notice, is when I go to a friends house, and they have a mechanical clunker or a hard drive. A "sometimes" slower ssd is still pretty damn quick.
It looks like Apple is leaving the people who bought those expensive 1 TB drives out in the cold. Not only does the company refuse to even tell its customers whether the drive uses TLC or not (which it most likely does), there has been no word on a firmware update:
If you had magician 4.5 you never saw an update coming. After some research I found they updated to 4.7 with a new firmware update. I updated magician but could not get the now noted firmware update to work. Finally I used the ISO update and it took. Thank you Samsung for all the obviously needed help you could provide easily in your PDFs. Not!
@Ryan Smith I'm about to clean and reinstall everything on my macbook pro should i do the firmware update now or with the formatted /clean/ SSD ????
i use this computer on my live performances/studio and since i installed the the 840 EVO 1TG as been giving me a lot of issues , computer running slow , OSX acting weird , this things can't happen LIVE thats why I'm cleaning everything and do a fresh install.
Does the issue affect the 840 EVO blade SSD? I have a 1 TB SSD. I tried to update the firmware, but it wasn't recognized as a valid target. Wondering what to do.
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LordConrad - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
Everyone knew that reliability would suffer when using Planar NAND for TLC drives, but I don't think anyone expected this many issues. This is why I didn't buy any TLC SSDs until they came equipped with 3D NAND.Romberry - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
It's not really a reliability issue, as in the drives aren't failing all over the place or that data is being lost. It's a performance issue on reads of "old" data. The drives still work in these situations, it's just that read speed falls back to something closer to old ATA spinning platters than to SSD or even current gen SATAII and SATAIII spinning disks.TheWrongChristian - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
Sequential read speeds fall back to mechanical levels from earlier in the century, but random read speeds (the ones you'll actually notice if slow) do not. My drive is affected by this, yet average random access times are still on the order of 0.15ms (as measured by gnome disk utility), 100x faster than HDD of today. I'm as yet undecided as to whether it's worth applying this fix, as performance for me is not noticeably affected, which I would guess is the case for 99% of the people moaning about this if they weren't looking for the problem.Achaios - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
Ιf you want to apply the fix, apply it. If you don't want to apply the fix, don't apply it. In any case, stop the QQ, you remind me of 10 year olds whining about Rogues in WoW Vanilla. Here, I even have a carebear for you.Malaria - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
Are you:a) Paid by Samsung
or
b) just an idiot?
chizow - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
Everyone knew and they bought them anyways, because they also knew they'd just buy a new SSD at 2x the capacity for the same price or less before TLC wear concerns became an issue.Honestly, SSDs to me now are like expensive CD-RWs, I replace them before durability ever becomes an issue.
theduckofdeath - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
You should probably look up what the word reliable means, LordConrad.LordConrad - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
"The ability of an item or device to work as expected"What's your point?
Matias - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
"Failed to update firmware on the selected drive.":-\
Lord 666 - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
I just want a refund or replacement with a 850 EVO of same capacity.A5 - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
You're not going to get that.Unless you want to spend a crap ton of money using Samsung, anyway.
chizow - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
I updated my 4xEVO array without any problems, a little trick for those who are doing multiple, you can upgrade 1 drive's firmware, and while it is counting down from 20s, just kill Magician in your Task Tray, re-open it, and update another drive. Do that for each of your drives, then shut down, and they should all have updated np.ssdengr - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
Unfortunately, they can't do the correct solution by just changing the read threshold because Intel has it patented. http://www.google.com/patents/US20120254699theduckofdeath - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
Maybe you should have read the "referenced by" section before posting this?SigmundEXactos - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
What about the 840 non-EVO? I have one lying around that I plan to stick in a new HTPC. Will this fix apply to that drive as well?hojnikb - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
nopeMrSpadge - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
AT should "torture" Samsung about the vanilla 840 every time they speak with them. And if nothing happens: point out this customer care failure when ever a new Samsung product is discussed.madwolfa - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
Is 840 affected as well? I have one in my desktop...Martin84a - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
Unfortunately yes. Samsung also acknowledged it on the German Samsung site, however there is no news about any fix.nevcairiel - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
Still no news about any plans for an update for the mSATA 840 EVOs. It clearly suffers from the same issues, but there is no firmware update, nor a manual fix option in the latest Magician.artasom - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
It seems that they have uploaded the firmware for Mac and Linux users. However, the message that rests along with the link ("Supports Advanced Performance Optimization in Magician 4.6" ) is quite misleading, in my opinion, as this software is Windows-only. Which brings me to wonder how this fix will work in Mac and Linux as Magician software is not available for this OSes,,,Coup27 - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
You definitely have a point regarding the description of the firmware.The answer to your question in theory at least is the firmware should work just as well. The new firmware is designed to automatically refresh (aka rewrite) old data to ensure it works at full speed. The advanced performance optimization is just a user initiated full drive rewrite. If you don't use that tool the drives firmware over time will rewrite any old data in the background.
At a guess I would say that after flashing the firmware the drive would rewrite all the data anyway so it starts from a clean slate so if you give your system a few hours of idle time after updating the firmware it should do the trick. I did run the advanced optimizer on my 120GB EVO and it took about 15 minutes.
artasom - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
Thanks for your comment. Another matter that bothers me is the "power cycle" request. I have this SSD in a Macbook and in every firmware update it requests me to do a power cycle after applying the update. This means that I need to unscrew the bottom of the laptop, apply the firmware update and when requested to do the power cycle carefully remove the bottom plate, release the SSD, unplug it and plug it again... But I think this is not requested in Windows. Is it really necessary?Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
Rebooting should also work. Power cycle essentially means that the drive needs to be powered off and then on again, which happens during a reboot.artasom - Thursday, April 30, 2015 - link
Thanks for your comment. Surprisingly, the firmware patching process took less that 10 seconds... This figure does not match to those that the users are reporting in Windows... Maybe the process is different than with the previous firmware update where all data was writen once when applying the update...Coup27 - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link
artasom in reference to power cycling I think you are mixing up a secure erase (SE) and a firmware update. When performing an SE the drive says it is frozen and must be physically disconnected from the power while the system is on and then plugged back in before the SE can be ran. This is not required for a firmware update. After using Windows Magician to update the firmware the system automatically shuts down. Leaving it powered off for a few seconds before turning it back on is all that is required.The new firmware does have a different process to the previous update which was a 2 stage process. The first stage was the firmware update and shut down. After powering back on the 2nd stage was to rewrite the whole drive. This time around because the firmware will rewrite the drive in the background it is not necessary to include it into the firmware update process but for Windows users they can initiate a full drive rewrite using the feature in Magician.
The actual firmware update process takes a couple of seconds. Anybody who says it takes longer in Windows is either referring to the original update or including the time to run an "Advanced Performance Optimization" as well.
leexgx - Thursday, April 30, 2015 - link
a power cycle is a restart of system or just shut downtaking the SSD out was bit over the top as you would of had to shut the mac down and take the battery out to get to do it :)
Maltz - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
A restart is NOT a power-cycle. The PSU continues to supply power to the drive through a restart. You have to shut the machine down and turn it back on. Putting it to sleep and waking it back up will also probably power-cycle the drive, which is useful for power-cycling the drive without rebooting, to unfreeze the drive's security settings when doing a secure erase, for example.Achaios - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
Many thanks to ANANDTECH and in particular, Ryan and Kristian, for pursuing the matter and keeping us updated.michal1980 - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
thanks? How about they stop whitewashing the issue. They somehow think a 26% reduction in product life is acceptable.leexgx - Thursday, April 30, 2015 - link
if you use it in server work loads it could be a problem (which voids the warranty an way as due to amount of data written), normal loads you should easily get 5-10 years out of it, all this fix is doing is making the SSD do what it should've been doing any way, and its Predictable reduction life as well (that trips at around 400TB you can still get about twice that before there are Problems happen)mapesdhs - Tuesday, May 5, 2015 - link
People are being very lenient with Samsung about all this. If this was an issue with an OCZ drive, everyone would be screaming from the rooftops. Very hypocritical IMO.Ian.
OnBoard - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
Well they got something magic in this firmware indeed.Before fix: http://i.imgur.com/omXwIr5.png
Instantly tested after reboot: http://i.imgur.com/TuMKnPJ.png
I think tomorrow my drive will be in full speed without any full drive rewrites.
leexgx - Thursday, April 30, 2015 - link
does look quite good, if you leave the system on long enough it should hopefully resolve itself) you can always run the Optimiser just once so emiedalty corrects the speeds (but really going form 40mb to 300mb/s is good)baii9 - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
"So the 840 EVO should be the last Samsung TLC drive to encounter this issue."The world should not end tomorrow.
trparky - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
It seems that TLC NAND isn't the only type of NAND that's having a problem at process nodes of 19nm of less. The Crucial MX200 SSD which uses 16nm MLC 128Gb NAND flash chips appears to be having the same very issue that the Samsung 840 EVO had, namely NAND flash voltage drifting which causes read speed performance issues on older data.What does this mean? Well, it means that pretty much NAND flash memory becomes unreliable as the process node shrinks past 20nm. NAND flash manufacturers have hit the wall when it comes to planar NAND. From this point on the only way to make NAND flash reliable is to reverse the process node shrinkage and go to 3D-NAND where NAND cells are stacked on one another instead of laid out flat.
Samsung started this trend in which they released their 3D-VNAND and reversed the process shrinkage to 40nm with their 850 line of SSDs. Other manufacturers are also doing the same with their own approach to 3D-NAND. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that NAND flash memory manufacturers have hit the wall in terms of shrinking NAND and that as you shrink the process node the NAND has far more of a chance of voltage drifting that can effect read speed performance as the data ages.
Squuiid - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
I wouldn't go near Crucial's MX series. Their MX100 has serious firmware problems which they still haven't been able to fix and the MX200 is also borked.Their firmware dev team are a joke.
trparky - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
I have one myself, I'm lucky I'm still within the 30-day return policy at Amazon.com. I already have another SSD on the way today and I'm shipping the piece of crap MX200 back to them for a full refund.Gigaplex - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
I've got an MX100 and haven't noticed any issues with it. What serious firmware problems are you referring to?trparky - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
Random BSODs caused by the MX100 dropping off the SATA channel. Read up on the Crucial forums.The fact that they released the MX200 quickly after the release of the original MX100 should tell you something, the MX100 is seriously broken and no amount of firmware fixes will fix the issue with MX100. They should be refunding those people who bought the MX100.
leexgx - Thursday, April 30, 2015 - link
i had over 15 MX100 never had BSOD issues (guess its some motherboards issues)serndipity - Thursday, April 30, 2015 - link
I purchased (2) 256GB MX100 drives (Fall of 2014) and always wondered why the BX100 & MX200 series came out, within 6 months of the MX100 availability. Just as Crucial finally introduced a SSD management tool (e.g. Storage Executive Client is a joke), I chose a Samsung 850 EVO for my next build. Although I knew of the 840 EVO 'old data' issue, their Magician software tool, 3D V-NAND flash memory w/ increased geometry and 5 year warranty were deciding factors.Although, fingers crossed, my MX100 installs, both in Win 7 laptops have been trouble free, I now see that others have had numerous issues with stability, power supply and NCQ trim. As a result, there has been a new firmware (MU02) release to fix these and other problems.
However, after reading of so many problems with this update within their user community, I decided not to apply the update at this time.
Achaios - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
Has anyone managed to successfully update the firmware via bootable USB? i.e. copy the files from the ISO file to a bootable USB, boot from the USB and apply the firmware update?Achaios - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
My PC hasn't even got a CD/DVD drive anymore. These are so 2008.Coup27 - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
Clearly they aren't so 2008 because it would be very useful to you right now.I understand why you may not bother to put one in your build but it's still handy to have a USB optical drive nearby.
trparky - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
Find a program called Rufus, it will allow you to make a bootable USB flash drive from the ISO file.Lothsahn - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
This new firmware has serious issues with fstrim under Linux. The previous revision did not.Can we get a big disclaimer in the article and ask Samsung for a response? Do they plan to address this?
Reported here:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1507897/samsung-840-evo...
trparky - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
The workaround is to not use the fstrim command and to use the discard flag in the fstab file instead.Gigaplex - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
I read through the thread and they tried switching to discard instead of fstrim. They still got data corruption. It sounds like TRIM is thoroughly broken, at least on their particular drive. Hopefully it's just an isolated case of faulty hardware.Azurael - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
Samsung's history with flash memory and TRIM/DISCARD is NOT good. Remember all those dead S2s, Notes, S3s, Note 2s, etc caused by their buggy eMMC firmware? I wouldn't touch a device with NAND flash which Samsung have been near with a bargepole these days.peterpanty - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
I just installed Samsung Magician 4.6 and upgraded the firmware and ran the optimization - for 30 minutes.Then for fun I ran the optimization again - another 30 minutes.
It is scary that the optimization needs another 30 minutes of optimization.
Should I run it a 3rd time? :-)
megadirk - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
It takes 30 minutes for you to run an optimization? It might take 5 minutes for me.peterpanty - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
Actually it takes more like 45 minutes.Maybe because I have 2 x 40GB files - (Virtual Machines.)
But it is not like the optimization defrags those files - so I do not know why it is taking so long.
WinterCharm - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
I have a question - if I have two partitions on my SSD, do I only need to do the firmware update once?Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
Yes. The number of partitions doesn't affect the FW update process.Achaios - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
How to update your drive's firmware (no CD/DVD drive needed, Win 7, 1X840 EVO AHCI):1. If RAPID mode is set to enabled, set it to disable and follow the instructions (reboot).
2. After reboot, install Samsung Magician 4.6. Follow instructions (reboot).
3. After Samsung Magician 4.6 has been successfully installed, open Samsung Magician, click on FIRMWARE UPDATE, click download, and click INSTALL. PC will reboot and the firmware will be updated automatically.
http://i.imgur.com/iQySCuA.jpg (After Firmware Upgrade, RAPID disabled, no perf optimization)
http://i.imgur.com/UZeG44h.jpg (After Firmware Upgrade, RAPID enabled, no perf optimization)
http://i.imgur.com/gs10SLd.jpg (After Firmware Upgrade, RAPID enabled, perf optimized)
Running Performance Optimization REDUCED the Burst Speed on my drive by up to 34.2 MB/sec as well as the average read by up to 1.3 MB/Sec.
skraftnm - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
I'm using rapid storage (50gb as cache for my main hdd). But there are some features like the firmware update that are disable. Does featurea are disabled because i have the cache enable or because i have RAID mode set in the bios?To use ssd as cache i need to have the storage mode set to raid instead of ahci, righ?
dromo - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
Linux users beware, discard and fstrim fail with this brilliant upgrade. OK fstrim, kinda depends on kernel version, but discard may make your disk unmountable.Bravo Samsung, way to go!
leexgx - Thursday, April 30, 2015 - link
still a problem at the Linux kernel not really the SSD itselfdromo - Friday, May 1, 2015 - link
Well, point of view I guess:) but queued trim commands worked fine until this fw relase. Why break it now and make 840 Evo unusable for linux users?toobluesc - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link
It definitely got worse for me. My Linux (4.0 kernel) times out regularly. Write-up on my blog @ http://bit.ly/1DN2XUM with some performance numbers and errors.My / and /home filesystems are mounted with "discard". I'll see if calms down in the next few days otherwise I'll try dropping discard. Sigh, this looks more like a regression. Worked flawlessly before the update from EXT0AB0Q to EXT0DB6Q.
skraftnm - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
I'm using my Evo in RAID mode, 50gb as cache for my system (rapid storage) and 70gb as regular partition.But i can't access ssd features such as firmware update and performance restoration because of the RAID mode set in the bios. (instead of AHCI).
What am i supposted to do?
Since i can't use the software, will it work just update firmware? (in another computer wich is using ahci mode)
How could i test my drive? (crystal disk mark will not test older data, right?)
fiveandhalf - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
Hi:Anyone experience 840 Pro firmware issue under raid controller?
we have 6 x 840 Pro 512GB running under Dell PowerEdge 720 with H710 controller as raid1, scores around 400MB/s sequential 4K write constantly over past year until last month, we upgraded 2 x SSD firmware from DXM05B0Q to DXM06B0Q and the sequential 4K write speed dropped dramatically from 400MB/s to fluctuation of 20-200MB/s in the same hardware.
We thought it might be our hardware, so we moved the two different firmware version SSD to another PowerEdge, (as 2 x raid0), as yield same result. We have been talking to Samsung helpdesk who has been nice but unhelpful, It seems to me this is a firmware bug.
BTW, if we plug the old and new version of SSD back to a desktop with a SATA3 connector, re-do the 4K write test, it is constantly lower on new firmware but not much, something like 390MB/s vs 420MB/s
Here is the command we use to test with a 20GB test file, we even re-format the drive and tested as empty drive, still same result
Sqlio.exe -kW -t4 -s30 -dS -o128 -fsequential -b4 -BH -LS testfile.dat
Hope anandtech.com lab can reproduce this issue, and if it is a bug, we can get Samsung to do something about it.
fiveandhalf - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
here is a screenshot of the test resulthttp://i60.tinypic.com/2ilk288.jpg
icarium_jag - Thursday, April 30, 2015 - link
Any update on new firmware for mSATA version?RSebire - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link
Thank you for this article. I've been reading this site for years, but never felt as compelled to say thanks before.Thank you for updating me on this issue.
I have the 840 EVO. Last month after your first article on this drive, I took the plunge and removed my 1TB 840 EVO out of my PS4 and did the performance restoration tool kit on it.
I haven't even finished installing my digital games on it yet (downloaded somewhere in the region of 800GB's this month on to it.) And now I must go and do it all over again.
I'm glad I read this site :)
My PlayStation Now Beta has gone mental in the last 48 hours, locking me out of games and apps, even taking my PlayStation Plus away. Thankfully it is not to do with this, and the only way I'm going to get my PlayStation 4 working again is to wait for the new Firmware that fix's it according to Sony support - So I wont be using it for several weeks anyway.
I just wanted to say thank you.
Kind regards
Richard
Choppedliver - Saturday, May 2, 2015 - link
Wow, some seriously spoiled brats and naysayers on here.Most people wouldn't know there was an "issue", because it's not an issue. It's only an issue to the "I told you so" people who need to be "right" about something.
I've got one. I am not even the slightest bit concerned, nor have I noticed an "issue".
What I do notice, is when I go to a friends house, and they have a mechanical clunker or a hard drive. A "sometimes" slower ssd is still pretty damn quick.
Oxford Guy - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link
It looks like Apple is leaving the people who bought those expensive 1 TB drives out in the cold. Not only does the company refuse to even tell its customers whether the drive uses TLC or not (which it most likely does), there has been no word on a firmware update:SM1024F
Oxford Guy - Sunday, May 3, 2015 - link
"Samsung Releases Second 840 EVO Performance Kludge"FIFY
Synomenon - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
Any word on an update for the mSATA version? Mine needs it.Texashots - Monday, September 21, 2015 - link
If you had magician 4.5 you never saw an update coming. After some research I found they updated to 4.7 with a new firmware update. I updated magician but could not get the now noted firmware update to work. Finally I used the ISO update and it took. Thank you Samsung for all the obviously needed help you could provide easily in your PDFs. Not!Industrialyzer - Thursday, October 8, 2015 - link
@Ryan Smith I'm about to clean and reinstall everything on my macbook pro should i do the firmware update now or with the formatted /clean/ SSD ????i use this computer on my live performances/studio and since i installed the the 840 EVO 1TG as been giving me a lot of issues , computer running slow , OSX acting weird , this things can't happen LIVE thats why I'm cleaning everything and do a fresh install.
Hope this update fixes the problems
thanks
jprokos - Sunday, November 15, 2015 - link
Does the issue affect the 840 EVO blade SSD? I have a 1 TB SSD. I tried to update the firmware, but it wasn't recognized as a valid target. Wondering what to do.