Assistance - Calling all Samsung EVO owners

Dervious · 31 Aug 2014 at 11:32

ANDARIAL said:
Managed to xget some free time.so decided to do a erase and restore
Big mistake
Cloned my drive ran it a few times,all working ok.secure erased via usb
Rebooted with crucial ssd (this had the clone on)blue screen can't repair,not happy am having to do a reinstal and ona crappy 2 meg line I am going to be at this all day

Did you clone the Samsung to the Crucial, test the Crucial a few times, erased the Samsung, then found that the Crucial did not boot ?

Also, at what point do you get the BSOD ?

ANDARIAL · 31 Aug 2014 at 11:58

Dervious said:
Did you clone the Samsung to the Crucial, test the Crucial a few times, erased the Samsung, then found that the Crucial did not boot ?

Also, at what point do you get the BSOD ?

yeah all of the above
blue screened at desktop
got windows reinstaled now all the updates to get

here is a new benchmark

Dervious · 31 Aug 2014 at 12:08

ANDARIAL said:
yeah all of the above
blue screened at desktop
got windows reinstaled now all the updates to get
here is a new benchmark

That looks better !

I`ve continued to punish my EVO a bit more.

So far there has been no drop in performance according to HD Tune. I`ve also notice that Samsung Magician's performance benchmark gives much better results. The random write IOPS have improved dramatically (used to struggle to get near to half their theoretical limit).

Dervious · 31 Aug 2014 at 12:39

ANDARIAL said:
Managed to xget some free time.so decided to do a erase and restore
Big mistake
Cloned my drive ran it a few times,all working ok.secure erased via usb
Rebooted with crucial ssd (this had the clone on)blue screen can't repair,not happy am having to do a reinstal and ona crappy 2 meg line I am going to be at this all day

If you`ve got Samsung Magician installed, could that be the reason you got the BSOD when using the clone on the Crucial ?

PMKeates · 31 Aug 2014 at 13:18

Not looking good :eek:

Going to secure erase and reinstall everything from scratch. What's the best tool to secure erase that people are having most success with - EaseUs Todo Backup?

Dervious · 31 Aug 2014 at 13:37

PMKeates said:
Not looking good

Going to secure erase and reinstall everything from scratch. What's the best tool to secure erase that people are having most success with - EaseUs Todo Backup?

I used EaseUS Todo Backup to create a backup image of my SSD. I also created an EaseUS boot disc to carry out the recovery after the erase. I then erased the SSD.

I then used Samsung Magician to create a USB Memory Stick Boot Utility to carry out the secure erase.

Finally, I restored the image of the SSD, made by EaseUS Todo.

This seems to have fixed the performance issue.

However, a word of warning. The restoration that I carried out using the boot disc "crashed" when it got very near to the end. That may have been a "one off", but it could have caused me some trouble. Luckily I have another Windows installation on a hard drive which I was able to boot into. From there, I rand the restore from the EaseUS Todo app on that drive. That proved to work properly, and my Samsung SSD was back to where it was before the secure erase, but with the performance issue fixed.

~Mike~ · 31 Aug 2014 at 13:57

Will be interesting to see how the performance goes for those that have secure erased their ssd's. If it seems to fix the issue then I will do mine.

wazza300 · 31 Aug 2014 at 14:08

ive had no problems using Samsung data migration and macrium reflect

Dervious · 31 Aug 2014 at 14:21

wazza300 said:
ive had no problems using Samsung data migration and macrium reflect

I haven't used Samsung Data Migration, but I have tried both the Macrium and EaseUs software. On the odd occassion, both have failed in some way, but both generally work well.

I most use EaseUs Todo, as I find the GUI a little better than Macrium Reflect.

ANDARIAL · 31 Aug 2014 at 14:34

Maybe that was where i went wrong.I just used macrium reflect,latest version.to clone my samsung ssd onto my crucial ssd.did have magician installed as well
oh well back to the sloooow updateing process
Hope i can get my steam folders copied over or that is another 25 GB+ to redownload

Dervious · 31 Aug 2014 at 15:01

ANDARIAL said:
Maybe that was where i went wrong.I just used macrium reflect,latest version.to clone my samsung ssd onto my crucial ssd.did have magician installed as well
oh well back to the sloooow updateing process
Hope i can get my steam folders copied over or that is another 25 GB+ to redownload

I take it that you still have the cloned image on the Crucial SSD.

If you have, you could try to fix the problem. Maybe boot in safe mode then uninstall Samsung Magician ?

PMKeates · 31 Aug 2014 at 16:13

I took the following steps:

1. Checked firmware - was already latest
2. Created Samsung secure erase bootable USB
3. Secure erased SSD
4. Installed Windows 8.1 Pro from scratch

The Samsung tool was showing totally garbled text on the main screen. To solve this, press ESC a couple of times to get to the command prompt, and run "SEGUI0.exe /s 2" - it will restart the secure erase tool with a readable font.

The Samsung tool then reported my SSD was frozen, and I had to pull out my SATA power cable and try again. It worked fine after and the secure erase completed very quickly.

Before and after results, then after some random file copying the benchmark results improve again. It seems a secure erase and a reinstall have certainly improved the HD Tune performance.

Dervious · 31 Aug 2014 at 17:57

ANDARIAL said:
Maybe that was where i went wrong.I just used macrium reflect,latest version.to clone my samsung ssd onto my crucial ssd.did have magician installed as well
oh well back to the sloooow updateing process
Hope i can get my steam folders copied over or that is another 25 GB+ to redownload

I still think you stand a decent chance of fixing that BSOD. If the cloned SSD booted into Windows, chances are the clone did work. I'd have tried safe mode before starting a clean install on the Samsung. Even if that didn't work, I'd do a basic Windows install on the Samsung (10-15 minutes of your time), then use that to delete the Samsung Magician folder from the Crucial SSD. Yes, that's a bit "naughty", but it might have prevented Magician from running, and maybe solved the BSOD issue.

PMKeates · 31 Aug 2014 at 18:35

Interestingly running Prime95 on a single core workload during the benchmark boosts overall performance and consistency. I presume this is because the CPU is not going in to the C3/C6 states:

Trox · 31 Aug 2014 at 19:43

Same problem with my Evo 1TB, looks like Trim isn't working correctly.

Backed up with EaseUS tool then secure erased and restored, all looking perfect again...

Kotu · 31 Aug 2014 at 20:34

It can't be related to trim as that only prevents slow writes on areas which had previously been written to, it should have no effect on reads at all.

Its a shame Macrium Reflect does not graph the backup/restore performance, I am about to try and secure erase my 250GB EVO and I have been keeping an eye on the transfer rate, its spent ~80% of the backup at 350Mb/s, which i thought wasnt too bad until I realised it was in megabits rather than bytes. It jumped up to 2Gb/s for the last 10% or so.

Dervious · 31 Aug 2014 at 20:43

Kotu said:
It can't be related to trim as that only prevents slow writes on areas which had previously been written to, it should have no effect on reads at all.

That's what I thought when I Googled TRIM earlier today.

It boils down to a benchmark problem, or a problem with the SSD.

I am wondering if there is a problem with the SSD, as since I`ve now got a much better benchmark I haven't noticed any change in performance apart from the smoother graph in HD Tune and a better result in Samsung Magician's benchmark.

Let's hope that Samsung can come up with an answer.

Aurhinius · 31 Aug 2014 at 21:01

It must be the SSD the question is how did we all manage to get our SSD's in to the state they were in and have to secure erase the drive to restore the performance.

I'll be keeping an eye on mine over the next few days/weeks.

For note my old drive that showed the bad HDtune performance also showed bad performance in acronis true image and res mon native to windows. As I know John's did and a fair few others so it's the drive all right but why... and how long does it take to get to that state.

wazza300 · 31 Aug 2014 at 21:07

trim and garbage collection should maintain the drive though?

don't see any performance loss with my 840 non evo and pro models

ANDARIAL · 31 Aug 2014 at 21:20

Dervious said:
I still think you stand a decent chance of fixing that BSOD. If the cloned SSD booted into Windows, chances are the clone did work. I'd have tried safe mode before starting a clean install on the Samsung. Even if that didn't work, I'd do a basic Windows install on the Samsung (10-15 minutes of your time), then use that to delete the Samsung Magician folder from the Crucial SSD. Yes, that's a bit "naughty", but it might have prevented Magician from running, and maybe solved the BSOD issue.

Time to come clean here it was a `naughty`W7.stuck on a solid blue screen no icons or control over the pc