Wouldn't be surprised if this is another pandemic supply chain casualty.
Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
141–150 of 243 posts
Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
#142For 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…
Is it a horrible tradeoff though? I can think of many situations where that would be a somewhat compelling alternative to a spinning platter.
Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Theoretically they provide an image to boot from to do the update, but the image seems very outdated and did not recognize my keyboard so it was unusable.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…
Also seems to have worked for me doing 3B2QGXA7→5B2QGXA7 in NixOS. Extract ISO, extract initrd, run fumagician, reboot.
Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
#144I'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
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.
Yep, you can even adjust the overprovisioning manually (at least for Samsung). So if you need more endurance (and improved random write performance) just buy bigger capacity and increase the over provisioning allocation.
Found this good summary about it with graphs showing the impact of it:
https://www.atpinc.com/blog/over-provisioning-ssd-benefits-e...
Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
#145Wouldn't be surprised if this is another pandemic supply chain casualty.
Sounds more like crappy firmware to me. This is not the first SSD to suffer from a crippling frimware flaw that is impossible to fix.
I lost almost an entire computer lab of Dells thanks to the goddamn Sandforce firmware. One that the company acknowledged but refused to lift a finger to fix. Luckily it is possible to fix these yourself despite the vendor hostility towards the repair. Look how easy it is: https://computerlounge.it/how-to-unbrick-sandforce-ssd/
Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
#146We 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?
It’s at 86% with 12.21TB written. Total power on time 68 days. Drive temp sits around 45 degrees celsius.
I’m not paying great attention to all the SMART counters day by day.
It’s for a dev workload so like … compiling code and stuff? I have the exact same workload on my desktop PC and its Samsung drive health is 99% after … years.
Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
#147The real problem is OS:es that write to disk for no good reason. Windows 10 writes 100KB/s constantly. That should be illegal.
Try running Windows 10 off of an older spinning laptop drive. It can take upwards of 40 minutes to display the desktop on the first boot after Windows Update runs. Even in normal operation those constant low level writes leave barely any breathing room for your actual applications. Full size hard drives do a bit better, but even then it can be pretty painful when the drive indexing service kicks off or .NET is updated.
Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure... @echo off pause robocopy "C:\Users\o\Desktop\2023" "D:\2023" /e /mir /np /v /tee /r:0 /w:0 /log+:"C:\Users\o\Desktop\log_robocopy.txt" pause @echo on
You don’t need to turn echo back on at the end of your batch file. That line is pointless.
And don't need /e since /mir=/e /purge
Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It’s at 86% with 12.21TB written. Total power on time 68 days. Drive temp sits around 45 degrees celsius. I’m not paying great attention to all the SMART counters day by day. It’s for a dev workload so like … compiling code and stuff? I have the exact same workload on my desktop PC and its Samsung drive health is 99% after … years.
OK, so close to 1% lifetime per TBW, or lifetime approximately 100TBW. Thanks! That's consistent with their endurance claims for the smallest SSDs (128GB PM991 for example, or 256GB 960 Evo) but it would be poor for a larger one.
Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
#150For 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…
It isn't a bad tradeoff for most read workloads.