Assistance - Calling all Samsung EVO owners

Random thought.

Could it be that one of the firmware updates caused the problem ?

TRIM might have gone a bit wonky after a firmware update with existing data on the SDD.

Maybe a secrue erase after the offending update is what is required.

If my drive's perfomance remains roughly at it's current level, then this theory could prove to be correct.

In fact, I`ve just deleted a 13gb folder, then copied about 30gb of various files onto the SDD. The graph looks even better now.



Could the secure erase have "fixed" the issue ?
 
strange I don't see the heartbeat effect on the clean drive of yours that I have on mine.

I'm using an intel sata 3 port in AHCI with the latest intel RST drivers

I see that on two totally different pc's as well but you don't.

So colour me slightly interested in that.

Others have shown the same heartbeat effect with a new drive earlier in the thread too so wondering why I don't see it on your drive.

That is a distraction from the real issues here though.
 
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My SSD is plugged into a white SATA socket on my motherboard, labelled "SATA 0".

All the SATA ports on the motherboard are Intel. The 2 x external eSATA sockets are Marvell.
 
Since I carried out the secure erase, it seems that my SSD is getting "better" all the time.

I`ve added a load of files to nearly fill it (from ~100GB used to ~185GB used), and this is the result......



No noticeable difference in how my PC performs though.
 
I suspect it might be that I have write buffer flushing on. I'll disable that and see if it clears the heartbeat effect. Well it didn't but then it shouldn't effect read performance anyway. Disabled rapid mode and still get that heartbeat effect in none data areas but not overly worried about it. Still your drive is looking healthy there.
 
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Doing different ?

Nothing really.

Tested my SSD. Rubbish.

Thought to myself "I wonder if a secure erase will do the trick ?".

Deleted some junk off my SSD. Tested my SSD. Still rubbish.

Used EaseUs Todo Backup to image my SSD.

Secure erased my SSD.

Used EaseUs Todo Backup to restore the image to my SSD.

Bingo.
 
Just for info - run HDtune on my 250G 840 standard (1yr and 4 months old and circa 132G of data on it) and its fairly static around the 240 MB/s mark - I'm on an Intel Sata II controller, so that's about right.

Ran the prog on my daughters 250G EVO (3months old and circa 60G of data on it) connected to a Marvel Sata controller hanging off of a PCIE 1X slot - it peaks at 150MB/s (as expected) but the first 30% it spikes between 150 and 30MB/s - really quite ugly :-( . So it's not a TLC issue, it's an Evo issue.
 
Dervious said:
Doing different ?

Nothing really.

Tested my SSD. Rubbish.

Thought to myself "I wonder if a secure erase will do the trick ?".

Deleted some junk off my SSD. Tested my SSD. Still rubbish.

Used EaseUs Todo Backup to image my SSD.

Secure erased my SSD.

Used EaseUs Todo Backup to restore the image to my SSD.

Bingo.
Click to expand...

Going to do mine now, just creating a bootable EaseUs CD. I cloned my 1 TB SSD to a spare 1 TB HDD as well as an image backup just incase.

My SSD is less than a month old, brand new with the latest firmware, it was a clone from a 2 TB HDD.

All benchmarks were perfect, no jumping graph lines, no heartbeat affect, just a flat line. Then for no reason around two weeks later it went massively downhill in HD Tune. Normal usage doesn't seem affected. Considering your drive is reporting normal benchmark results this must be fixable with a firmware update.

Will look forward to seeing how your drive is in a week or two.

Have to restore around 400gb, so it will take me an hour or so to report my benchmark results after a secure erase. Looking forward to seeing what happens.
 
Good luck with the boot disc.

For some reason, my first restore stalled with just a minute or two to go. I resorted to booting to Windows on a spare hard drive, and running the EaseUs restore from there.

I still rate EaseUs Todo, but like all of the imaging software I`ve tried, it can be a bit "iffy" once in a while.

I will be keeping an eye on my drive's benchmarks over the coming days/weeks.

As you stated, I didn't know there was a problem until I saw this thread. Even though I seem to have (temporarily) fixed the problem, I haven't noticed any difference in performance.
 
I'm restoring now with the boot disc. It's halfway there. Did have an issue with the secure erase. Booted up to jumbled text. That was with a 780 Ti and Intel 4600 IGPU.

Had to press escape to get a DOS prompt, and enter segui0.exe /s to get readable text. Seems this issue has been around for a while. Samsung really need to fix that.
 
More oddities...?

After reading some of the last few posts, thought I would give a secure erase a try.

Downloaded and installed the latest Samsung Magician software. Went into the secure erase section, and it's reporting for the EVO that "The attached SSD is in a frozen state." in red letters. Still working fine within windows at the time though.

Tried doing a secure erase and it comes up with a message "Drive is in a frozen state - to resolve, follow the following steps" (or words to that effect) - steps are to open pc (don't switch off!), disconnect power to drive, wait a couple of seconds then reconnect.

(edit :- pic added )

samsung2.JPG
Ok, so thought this may be due to something in windows locking the drive or a file. So created a bootable USB stick and booted from that. Ran the util in dos - and got the exact same message?

Switched off pc, powered up for a nice cold boot - same thing? So, followed steps (disconnect power to drive, wait a few seconds then reconnect) which when clicking ok states to rerun the app then closes it. Ran it again and it worked and erased the drive.

Puzzled why this is different to a cold boot? Something in the bios/efi post process maybe locking out the drive or interfering with something the secure erase process uses? Anybody else get the same error?

Ran a quick speed test before erase :-

disk15.jpg


And drive after erase + creating partition with a quick format - ticks are still there, but overall speed seems a little faster. :-

disk19.jpg


Copying some game data back now via windows drag and drop so will see if this has made any difference on data populated areas...

....that'll be a no then. :(

disk20.jpg


disk21.jpg


Dervious said:
I used EaseUs Todo Backup to carry out the backup/restore. The restore was carried out with "Optimize for SSD" enabled.
Click to expand...

Perhaps this is the key? May try a backup with EaseUs Todo and then restore using this option and see if that changes anything. Wonder what this option actually does...
 
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Took me a while, for some reason backing my drive took 40mins, restoring took 2hrs 30mins :confused:

Plus even though I used the optimise SSD on EaseUS, it knocked my alignment out, so I had to realign my OS partition, that was another 40mins :(

So I did a secure erase, and wrote and extra 800gb of data to the drive and the benchmark is perfect.

This is before the secure erase.

8mb_zps669052b4.jpg


This is after with 434gb filled, plus that data has been moved again due to realigning the partition.

Capture_zps6397bdc6.jpg


Even though the OS is just as responsive, I did notice opening photoshop was twice as fast as before on a fresh reboot. So it was definitely affecting the performance but as the SSD is so responsive it's hard to notice.
 
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fizzy said:
Perhaps this is the key? May try a backup with EaseUs Todo and then restore using this option and see if that changes anything. Wonder what this option actually does...
Click to expand...

I used optimise to SSD when I originally cloned my 2 TB HDD to my new 1 TB EVO just 3 weeks ago. I think it's suppose to align the partition during the restore/cloning, didn't work for me though if that's what it's supposed to do. Had to manually align using partition magic.

My HD Tune results were perfect as above. Then two weeks later the results looked as bad as above. No idea why.

The drive is now back to normal after a secure erase and I restored my image. Will see how it goes during the next week or two. This really looks like a possible firmware issue. The SSD otherwise runs very well.

My PC runs 24/7, so not sure if that has anything to do with it. Doubt it but thought I would mention it.
 
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Some interesting results folks. It seems like using this cloning software is working much better than using Acronis True Image 2011 that I used.

I am going to Try Acronis again on my partners drive to the new drive to see if it clones straight to rubbish performance.

Not that the type of cloning software used should make a difference and they give acronis away with certain drives so shouldn't be an issue.

I get the same results as Fizzy as you have seen and after a while in time the drives seem to just get progressively worse.

Definitely a drive issue it seems.

For reference I am using Acronis True Image 2011 - straight disk to disk clone from old EVO to new EVO. This causes the PC to reboot and do the copy before the OS loads.
 
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Prompted by this thread I've been meaning to look at the 840 EVO 250GB drive in my server for a while. It will be interesting to see the conclusion of this one.



Background info: the drive is on a sata2 port in my WHS2011 server and has been running 24-7 for about 10 months. It's on the latest firmware (according to Magician) and about 86GB of capacity is being used which will be a fairly constant figure. The 'performance optimisation' option within the Magician tool doesn't seem to have helped at all - probably not surprising as WHS2011 supports TRIM.
 
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