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Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

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Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#171

Post by namibj »

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.

Samsung 980 Pro, the original, does that when sufficiently empty, to offer around iirc 10% nominal capacity of SLC-mode write buffer (given they are TLC, that would be around 30% of the NAND).

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#172

Post by wtallis »

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).

Almost all SSDs internally track allocations in a 4kB granularity. That size is what leads to the convention of equipping the drive with 1GB of DRAM for every 1TB of NAND flash, when the drive is designed to hold the entire table of logical to physical address mappings in DRAM.

It's now common for consumer SSDs to have less DRAM than the normal 1GB per 1TB ratio, but they run their FTL with the same 4kB granularity and just don't have the full lookup table in RAM. There are at least a handful of special-purpose enterprise drives that use a larger sector size in their FTL, such as the 32kB used by WD's SN340: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14723

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#174

Post by geocrasher »

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.

Oh, now I feel like a total idiot. Thank you for clarifying that. Good thing is, I still needed a bigger drive so now that's on the way :)

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#175

Post by geocrasher »

arprocter wrote: post #70
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…

You might want to double-check that SMART status in CrystalDiskInfo I don't trust Magician to report correctly on other vendor's storage

Yep, I was wrong on this. I should have used my google-fu instead of jumping to a conclusion. I guess I just really wanted an excuse to upgrade to a 4TB :)

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#176

Post by ggreer »

aendruk wrote: post #113
ggreer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on linux, you probably want to use fwupd[1]. You can check the existing version of your drive's firmware by running `fwupdmgr get-devices`. The version with the fix is 5B2QGXA7. I'm on Arch and apparently I installed the update at some point in the past. 1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fwupd

Samsung is publishing some firmware but not this. ( https://fwupd.org/lvfs/vendors/#samsung , https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/issues/5477 ) $ fwupdmgr get-updates Devices with no available firmware updates: • SSD 980 PRO 2TB It would be good to put some pressure on Samsung to use the Linux Vendor Firmware Service. I just opened a support ticket about it. fwupd is at least manually adding a warning about the affected f…

Oops, you're correct. Looking through my shell history, it seems I manually downloaded and installed the firmware update in March of 2022. Here are the commands I ran:

    curl -O https://semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/software-resources/Samsung_SSD_980_PRO_5B2QGXA7.iso
    mkdir /mnt/iso
    sudo mount -v -o loop ./Samsung_SSD_980_PRO_5B2QGXA7.iso /mnt/iso/
    mkdir /tmp/fwupdate
    cd /tmp/fwupdate
    gzip -dc /mnt/iso/initrd | cpio -idv --no-absolute-filenames
    cd root/fumagician/
    sudo ./fumagician

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#177

Post by scns »

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…

> that caused everything from system hangs, game crashes to file corruption on OTHER drives.

Interesting. Maybe my M2 (WD 570) is the cause for the hangs in my system. Thank you very much!

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#178

Post by scns »

post-it wrote: post #100
jamhan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is it possible that your motherboard or PSU is killing the drives? Could also just be sheer chance, of course.

How does this happen? Got any background info?

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#179

Post by [deleted] »

evil-olive wrote: post #96

every machine I have that can fit 2 SSDs (basically, everything except the very slim laptops) I have converted over to running a ZFS mirror as its root filesystem. NixOS makes this very easy to do because the grub.mirroredBoots option [0] removes the need for a separate "bootpool" with limited ZFS feature flags. and crucially, I always make sure they're 2 drives from different manufacturers , so that a bug of this na…

[deleted]

Re: Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

#180

Post by zargon »

acabal wrote: post #32
bombcar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A perfect example why RAID ain’t backup

Indeed! Fortunately the RAID was also backed-up offsite. But, the entire process was shocking in several ways. At least Samsung was fairly speedy with the RMAs and it was basically no-questions-asked... because I imagine they're getting tons of these mailed back to them.

Did they require the failed drives to be returned? Did the secure erase function work on a failed drive? I guess this is a good reason for full disk encryption even on machines where I'm satisfied with their physical security.
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