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Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

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Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#191

Post by wtallis »

wmf wrote: post #167
wahern wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 or…

In theory an SSD could run TLC NAND in SLC mode with just a firmware change but I'm not aware of any such drives.

Enmotus partnered with Phison to produce a QLC SSD that mapped the first several GB of logical blocks to SLC. This was sold bundled with Enmotus's SSD caching software, but it could also be treated as simply having a SLC partition and a QLC partition that are largely independent.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#192

Post by Aardwolf »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #103
Aardwolf wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks, but that takes me to old firmware. I was however able to download the new firmware from https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/t... and use the same procedure and it worked: ├─SSD 980 PRO 2TB: │ Device ID: 03281da317dccd2b18de2bd1cc70a782df40ed7e │ Summary: NVM Express solid state drive │ Current version: 5B2QGXA7 My home is on non-redundant stripe of two 980 Pro which both had the bad fir…

The command line example in the link shows the old firmware, but they do say to go to the samsung website and get the latest one there. The 980 was the first one in the list there under the Firmware section.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#193

Post by duckmysick »

justinclift wrote: post #85

As a data point, the Linux kernel has a long list of workarounds for "ata" related devices (SSDs, HDDs, etc): https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/69f2c9346313ba3d3dfa4... Can be a bit eye opening to look down that and see equipment you're using listed. ;)

What's horkage?

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#194

Post by Havoc »

walrus01 wrote: post #163
Havoc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>destructive "write lifespan until ultimate failure" real world tests on SSDs >from 7 years ago It's from 7 years back for good reason. They stopped doing those tests when it became impractical as endurance increased. The drives are now good enough that you can't wear them out fast enough to make sense in a review setting ...unless fundamentally broken like these

I find it highly improbable that you couldn't wear out a 3-level-cell or 4-level-cell consumer grade SSD which is capable of 300-500MB/s writes with a 24x7 automated test script in just a few months. Maybe even just a couple of weeks. The published total DWPD (drive-writes-per-day) endurance on these is not that great. Even assuming a conservative 300MB per second, there's 86400 seconds in one day. That's 25920000 MB…

>Or close to 26TB per day. The samsung 960 Pro 2TB is rated by its manufacturer for a total 1200TB of write endurance lifespan.

Right. So around a month and a half. In a world where hardware news drops simultaneous by multiple outlets literally within minutes of news embargoes being lifted.

That's a lot of time investment to get result that are boring AF ("we tested them. they work"). Have very little real life consumer relevance. And the manufacturer that sent you the review sample definitely doesn't want to see (focus on edge case negative).

>Or at least leave it running for a couple of weeks and then see what the SMART-reported remaining write lifespan data reports it to be

Yeah that would make a bit more sense. Run various units down to 95%. That said the resulting story would still have watch paint dry appeal only

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#195

Post by short_sells_poo »

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…

"I happen to know that is because I heated it with a hair dryer to find out what would happen if it crossed the critical temperature."

Ah this is a fantastic and true hacker mindset :)

Willing to tamper with fairly expensive equipment just for the heck of it.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#196

Post by [deleted] »

rogers18445 wrote: post #102
bullen wrote: post #77

The real problem is OS:es that write to disk for no good reason. Windows 10 writes 100KB/s constantly. That should be illegal.

This doesn't actually matter in a practical sense. Assuming 24/7, it's 3TB a year. Which is ~1% drive endurance. Also, if you are worried about overwriting the same files over and over, it also doesn't matter. Block device addresses are not physical addresses, controller maps them to wear the drive evenly.

[deleted]

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#197

Post by mvdwoord »

sebazzz wrote: post #183

SSDs are complex beasts :-) I've had an OCZ SSD in the past that also became read-only, in the sense that all changes after shutting down the computer were gone. If you rebooted everything was fine, but as soon as the computer was shut down and the SSD also ran out of power, it converted to the state before turning on the computer. That was so bizarre. Once I had a hefty Windows upgrade installed and it was gone afte…

sounds ideal for a public terminal ;)

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#198

Post by GordonS »

acabal wrote: post #23
adrenvi wrote: 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…

I just had a 2TB 870 EVO fail too! There were SMART errors about uncorrectable errors, and I saw CRC errors in the OS. I lost some data.

This issue is all over the Internet, yet Samsung would not acknowledge it was a known issue. They also refused my RMA because the corner of one of the plastic port guides was chipped - we're talking about a miniscule chip, barely visible with the human eye. So despite the fact this drive was obviously defective, Samsung won't replace it. So I'm down £350 (£225 for the original drive, and £125 for the Crucial I had to buy to replace it), through no fault of my own.

I'm not buying Samsung SSDs again - problems are one thing, but how you deal with them is paramount.

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#199

Post by Wowfunhappy »

userbinator wrote: post #159
wahern wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 or…

Is it even possible to buy SLC drives any more? Yes, small ones for industrial use. They're extremely expensive, however. Looking at the raw NAND flash prices, SLC seems to still be around $4.60USD/GB, or roughly the same as it was over a decade ago, while MLC is already https://www.newark.com/micron/mt29f4g08abaeawp-it-e/flash-me... If the pricing was sane, SLC drives would be only 4x more expensive as QLC ones for…

Do you think the pricing difference could be due to economies of scale?

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#200

Post by ssdpain »

wtallis wrote: post #67
zerocrates wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> 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. Given that it's two gen4 drives in a laptop being subjected to a moderately heavy sustained workload, I'd also suspect a thermal problem or maybe even power delivery. Those two slots are prob…

I always suspected that it may be ability for laptop hardware to handle the second drive as performance was not as quite as performant as primary slot. Both slots are rated for PCIE 4 though.

It is strange though that after the firmware update there have been zero freezes.

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