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Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

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Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#131

Post by dinvlad »

jeffbee wrote: post #130
dinvlad wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth checking if you have any thermal issues with it. Mine failed in a similar way due to presumably a rookie mistake of forgetting to remove the thermal pad tape on the mobo.

It's not likely that thermal issues would cause bad reliability on these things. At worst you could expect intermittently bad performance. You can check for this condition with `nvme smart-log`. If your device was often overheated, it would have "critical composite temperature time" non-zero. My Samsung that has been in service for years and has no thermal solution has a value of 1 minute and I happen to know that is…

Ha, interesting! Makes sense, the drive is supposed to just throttle itself before it can reach unsafe temps. I’ll def try to check, didn’t know the drive recorded that - thanks for the tip. In any case, now I know RMA is in order

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#132

Post by vlovich123 »

rogers18445 wrote: post #129
wtallis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, lots of tiny writes scattered all over will tend to produce much higher write amplification than large sequential writes. So you'll get more actual wear to the drive from the 3TB of constant background churn than if you copied in 3TB of movies.

Those writes would have to be significantly smaller than the SSD's page (sector) size which is 512 bytes or 4 KiB. And would have to be written to different pages in rapid succession (to be flushed apart) - a standard serial write wouldn't trigger this even if it's 1 byte at a time, the OS FS cache would buffer it. It would have to be very misbehaving software or deliberate sabotage.

I’m pretty sure SSDs can only do 4kib aligned writes regardless of the FS sector size (under the hood it’s a write amplification unless the OS or controller manage to coalesce them. But yea, it depends on how things are getting flushed, but generally I wouldn’t expect too much magic unless you get lucky. It sounds like a small bug in the OS (ie these kinds of wires should be matched in memory in the application).

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#133

Post by taspeotis »

We have Lenovo laptops at work with M.2’s that are OEM-branded Samsungs.

One bricked itself in to read only mode after a few months.

The other has been losing 1% health each week or so. I caught it losing 2% in just two days recently.

These drives are older than the 990 model mentioned in the article but I have my suspicions anyway they’re dud drives.

Nothing lost except time - they can be swapped under warranty. But I used to buy Intel exclusively before swapping to Samsung when Intel started selling rebranded drives.

I guess the search for a reliable vendor starts again…

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#134

Post by jeffbee »

taspeotis wrote: post #133

We have Lenovo laptops at work with M.2’s that are OEM-branded Samsungs. One bricked itself in to read only mode after a few months. The other has been losing 1% health each week or so. I caught it losing 2% in just two days recently. These drives are older than the 990 model mentioned in the article but I have my suspicions anyway they’re dud drives. Nothing lost except time - they can be swapped under warranty. But…

These anecdotes are pretty frustrating without the other key piece of information. For the given lifetime indicators, how many writes were served? Are they wearing out faster than their TBW claims, or are they being written more than you expected?

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#135

Post by wmf »

userbinator wrote: post #111

For the same price, you can get twice the space for 1/4 the endurance, thrice the space for 1/8th the endurance, and now four times the space for 1/16th the endurance. Most people don't realise that is a horrible tradeoff, because NAND flash marketing and terminology like "TLC" or "QLC" is intentionally deceptive and manufacturers have been very secretive about the true endurance specifications, as well as trying to…

While NAND endurance has certainly gone down, FTLs got much better during the same time so that SSD endurance is still fine for most people. And if the stock endurance isn't enough, a little overprovisioning is probably better than dropping back to very expensive MLC.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#136

Post by rogers18445 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #132
rogers18445 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those writes would have to be significantly smaller than the SSD's page (sector) size which is 512 bytes or 4 KiB. And would have to be written to different pages in rapid succession (to be flushed apart) - a standard serial write wouldn't trigger this even if it's 1 byte at a time, the OS FS cache would buffer it. It would have to be very misbehaving software or deliberate sabotage.

I’m pretty sure SSDs can only do 4kib aligned writes regardless of the FS sector size (under the hood it’s a write amplification unless the OS or controller manage to coalesce them. But yea, it depends on how things are getting flushed, but generally I wouldn’t expect too much magic unless you get lucky. It sounds like a small bug in the OS (ie these kinds of wires should be matched in memory in the application).

I do wonder if perhaps the good NVME SSD controllers come with magic. It would take a single instance of malware ruining SSD's with 4000x write amplification to taint some brands while aiding the marketing of others.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#137

Post by wmf »

dinvlad wrote: post #120
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #34

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.

Seems weird that only 2TBs fail then

This sounds like a firmware bug that has nothing to do with endurance.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#138

Post by wahern »

userbinator wrote: post #111

For the same price, you can get twice the space for 1/4 the endurance, thrice the space for 1/8th the endurance, and now four times the space for 1/16th the endurance. Most people don't realise that is a horrible tradeoff, because NAND flash marketing and terminology like "TLC" or "QLC" is intentionally deceptive and manufacturers have been very secretive about the true endurance specifications, as well as trying to…

> as well as trying to overprice SLC out of production.

Is it even possible to buy SLC drives any more? For the past 5+ years the only outlet I've been able to find that even advertise SLC is https://www.delkin.com/, and you need to speak to sales to even get a price. I just assumed they and any other similar suppliers bought giant lots of chips at the tail end of SLC production and jack up the price on every new order as their supply dwindles. Or maybe they cobble together drives from the tiny SLC chips used for cache on modern SSDs?

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#139

Post by Macha »

jamhan wrote: post #80
mgdlbp wrote: post #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 th…

My anecdata: tl;dr: All 3 of my Samsung M.2 NVMe SSDs have failed in less than 3 years. 100% failure rate. My first SSD was a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO. It failed after 2 years and 8 months. It was replaced under warranty with a 1TB 970 EVO Plus. That replacement has now also failed after 1 year and 9 months. I bought a 2nd 1TB 970 EVO Plus in May 2019. It has now also failed (2 years and 7 months). Both are expected to be…

My anecdata, I have a 840 Pro, 850, 850 EVO, 970 and 980 Pro, all still running for years

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#140

Post by stavros »

megous wrote: post #82
geocrasher wrote: post #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 label…

The value rising from 80 to 81 is an improvement. The calculated value decreases when the raw value of "Hardware ECC Recovered" worsens.

Is this the case for all SMART values? Higher=better?
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