Live data from Hacker News

Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

pugetsystems.com

51–60 of 243 posts

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#51
post #5

I installed 2 x 980 Pro 2Tb in a laptop in Nov 2022. Running a daily Robocopy bat script to backup a folder in C: to D: would freeze a couple of times a week and lock the D: drive. After reboot, a drive check would find no errors and everything would work as normal. I've used the same script for years with no issues. Since the firmware update last week Robocopy has not frozen the drive at all this week.

The freeze/reboot/fine cycle seems to be a common one for SSDs acting poorly, running out of blocks they want to use internally, or memory or cache or something, or just hanging in their own firmware for whatever other reason.

One of my earlier forays into switching to SSDs, I installed Intel... I think it was 525, 535, something like that, 2.5 inch SATA drives in several different machines. Every one has failed by now with this similar mode of (in)operation. On my desktop where I had one, it would simply bluescreen, but then come back fine until eventually reading certain parts of the disk would just always cause it to hang and it had to be replaced. Failed SSDs like this are interesting because Windows (and to a lesser extent Linux) really aren't prepared for the disk to just hang, so trying to recover anything off them can be a challenge.

Just recently I found out the last one I had around, in a little headless desktop server, was the cause of my problems with it where it would partially hang after a couple days of uptime. Having finally gotten around to having it hooked up to a display, I was treated to a sea of red dmesg errors from the disk.

I think ultimately part of the problem was new power-saving features Intel had tried to add for these disks, which would cause them to write to themselves a large amount and just eat through their useful lifetime much faster than you'd assume.

In almost every case, I replaced these with, of course... Samsungs. Though I believe I've been lucky enough not to choose any of their bad ones.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#52

I've been trying to find a decent endurance NVME in the m.2 form factor for write-heavy applications and it appears that true 2-bit MLC has all but disappeared, replaced by 3-bit TLC and higher (with commensurate loss of endurance) The high endurance SSDs appear to be only available in u.2\u.3\hhhl and god-help-me EDSFF form factors Any suggestions? Micron's 7450 isn't readily available

You may also want to ask over on reddit in /r/newMaxx. Good place for SSD info and there is a pinned post for asking questions like this

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#53
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's true that MLC is mostly dead, you might want to consider a higher capacity TLC ssd. If you double your capacity, you double the endurance since SSD endurance is in drive writes per day, and a bigger SSD will likely have a bigger SLC cache to help with the write speed.

2 -> 3 bit cells is a 1.5x capacity bump. i would not be shocked to find tlc has a >1.5x impact on dwpd.

But it might be easier to find e.g. a 3x sized TLC compared to a 1x size MLC in the FF that GP wants.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#54
Apparently a few months ago it became known on the Chinese internet that the 980 Pro, 970 Evo Plus with new controller, and OEM versions are prone to getting unreadable sectors, where SMART 'Media and Data Integrity Errors' increases on every read attempt.

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/x82mwe/samsung_ss... https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/x8arle/psa_sam...

How I came across this: Ran into this last week(!) on a 6-month old drive -- but I'm not in China....hmm. Not just one bad batch? Interestingly, it's non deterministic - the data is backed up but trying ddrescue, it occasionally succeeds at reading a few kilobytes from the 5 MB of several runs of 512-16384 bytes that can't be read or written. Curious to see what happens with a firmware update and secure erase.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#55
post #7

I have this exact model, 980 Pro 2TB. It says to update firmware, but how can you do that from Linux? The instructions are all about some Windows program. Thanks! EDIT: I'm quite happy with the warning from this article, fixed a potential future problem!

A few months ago I already updated my Samsung SSD by following this procedure: https://askubuntu.com/a/1386451 . Theoretically they provide an image to boot from to do the update, but the image seems very outdated and did not recognize my keyboard so it was unusable.

I now found and followed this:

https://blog.quindorian.org/2021/05/firmware-update-samsung-...

And it seems to have worked. After extracting this updater tool and running it, smartctl kept showing the old firmware version (3B2QGXA7), but after reboot it now shows the new version (5B2QGXA7).

I took the risk of running this while the OS (Archlinux) was running with the disk mounted (this is the OS install disk), and at first sight this didn't cause issues. But still do it at your own risk!!

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#56
post #7

I have this exact model, 980 Pro 2TB. It says to update firmware, but how can you do that from Linux? The instructions are all about some Windows program. Thanks! EDIT: I'm quite happy with the warning from this article, fixed a potential future problem!

I just put the same drive in my PS5 in December. None of my Windows machines have spare NVMe slots, so updating this should be interesting

boot from Windows on a SATA drive?

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#57
post #7

I have this exact model, 980 Pro 2TB. It says to update firmware, but how can you do that from Linux? The instructions are all about some Windows program. Thanks! EDIT: I'm quite happy with the warning from this article, fixed a potential future problem!

A few months ago I already updated my Samsung SSD by following this procedure: https://askubuntu.com/a/1386451 . Theoretically they provide an image to boot from to do the update, but the image seems very outdated and did not recognize my keyboard so it was unusable.

I think I managed to upgrade the firmware from within Kubuntu (it wasn't the OS Nvme) by using this method

https://blog.quindorian.org/2021/05/firmware-update-samsung-...

I've done it some months ago, so I don't remember if it was that one exactly.

I'm now relieved to know that 5B2QGXA7 is still the current one.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#58
Funny thing. This article prompted me to check the health of my two Samsung SSD's (a 250GB 850 EVO SATA III, and a 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe), which were fine.

But Samsung's Magician also listed my Seagate ST2000DM008-2FR102 2TB spinny disk. It found a SMART error. I ran a performance test and looked at SMART again, and the "Hardware ECC Recovered" value went from 80 to 81, with a threshold of 64. My other software labels this as "good". Nevertheless, this drive is now being replaced by a 4TB WD Blue. Thanks, article. Saved me some future troubles!

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#59
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lifetime warranties used to be commonplace, I wish we could return to those times, or at least to a time of repairability.

It also used to be the case that a computer was basically ewaste within two or three years because a new one would be ten times faster.

Growing up poor, I was always a few generations behind, rocking a 486 DX2 when the PII & PIII where the latest and greatest. 33kbps modem when others had 56k. When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#60
post #23
post #18

Samsung 870 EVO drives were also known to fail early including my 2TB model. https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/samsung-870-evo-b...

Yes, this bit me just last month. Around October 2022 I purchased 3 Samsung 870 EVO 2TBs for use in a RAID array. By January 2023, all three of them failed within a week of each other! Fortunately they failed one by one, so I was barely was able to recover my RAID array by pulling out one drive at a time, powering the computer off, and waiting for the RMA replacement to arrive. But imagine my shock to see one drive f…

when equipping a storage system, it does make sense to use disks from different manufacturers, different models, and different vintages (manufacturing batches).

equipping a storage system with disks all of the same make, model, and vintage is invoking the statistics gods to strike failure all at once (or close enough that you won't be able to keep up with the rate of failure and time to rebuild)

personal experience: attempting to rescue a failing 192 disk system containing disks all of the same make and model. wearisome.

Post reply on HN