Assistance - Calling all Samsung EVO owners

sprite1275 · 13 Sep 2014 at 12:49

Ok so i managed to make a secure erase boot CD, booted the pc up via CD boot drive and followed the instructions.
It didnt work the first time and said it was frozen again, then it said try again and type in SEGUI0.exe which i did and this time it performed the secure erase.

When i boot the PC back into windows and go into Magician, go into the secure erase option it is still coming up that the SSD is frozen. I Uninstalled magician and reinstalled it but still comes up the same.

Question is do i ignore it and carry on with the migration of my OS or not?

The boot secure Erase that i did must have done something as the partition that was on the SSD has now gone.

Dervious · 13 Sep 2014 at 13:18

The SSD will be frozen every time the PC is powered up. That is perfectly normal.

The partition that was on the SSD will be gone, secure erase erases everything and takes the SSD back to "new" (apart from it will have had some use).

You can now carry on and migrate your OS.

sprite1275 · 13 Sep 2014 at 13:38

So now going into the migration it is not giving me the option to partition the SSD. Jesus, think i might stay with HDD :mad:

Dervious · 13 Sep 2014 at 14:27

I`ve never used the Samsung migration software, but are you sure you have to create a partition ?

sprite1275 · 13 Sep 2014 at 16:24

Yes it let me when I used it the first time in my other PC. I've give up anyway and now doing a fresh install.

littlepuppy · 14 Sep 2014 at 23:35

Sold off all my samsungs and replaced with intels... Will not deviate again, thanks again for the heads up here guys.

Rroff · 14 Sep 2014 at 23:37

littlepuppy said:
Sold off all my samsungs and replaced with intels... Will not deviate again, thanks again for the heads up here guys.

I usually buy Intel or Kingston for SSDs though Kingston did pull a bit of a dirty with the NAND on one model. That said I've not had any actual realworld issues with this 840 Evo so far.

Dervious · 15 Sep 2014 at 07:14

littlepuppy said:
Sold off all my samsungs and replaced with intels... Will not deviate again, thanks again for the heads up here guys.

That seems a bit of an extreme response.

My Evo had a fair bit of use in the year it's been in my PC (2.4TB or data writes). The benchmark graph looked pretty bad, but I hadn't noticed any real worl performance issues.

A secure erase and restore seems to had fixed whatever the problem was. Although I don't yet know if the problem will return. If the problem does return, either Samsung fixes it, or Samsung gets the SSD back.

littlepuppy · 15 Sep 2014 at 09:28

Dervious said:
That seems a bit of an extreme response.

My Evo had a fair bit of use in the year it's been in my PC (2.4TB or data writes). The benchmark graph looked pretty bad, but I hadn't noticed any real worl performance issues.

A secure erase and restore seems to had fixed whatever the problem was. Although I don't yet know if the problem will return. If the problem does return, either Samsung fixes it, or Samsung gets the SSD back.

Its more the fact Samsung dont seem to be doing a lot to fix it, been following the thread for a while.. I keep a lot of photo's and things that are precious to me on these drives... Not impressed at all with Samsung.. Never had one fail but the way they operate leaves me thinking that maybe some of it is more by luck... I would rather stick with Intel as you just dont seem to get these problems with their drives.

Tephnos · 15 Sep 2014 at 18:41

Admittedly considering my results I'll probably try Intel next time for SSDs.

Rroff · 15 Sep 2014 at 20:14

littlepuppy said:
Its more the fact Samsung dont seem to be doing a lot to fix it, been following the thread for a while.. I keep a lot of photo's and things that are precious to me on these drives... Not impressed at all with Samsung.. Never had one fail but the way they operate leaves me thinking that maybe some of it is more by luck... I would rather stick with Intel as you just dont seem to get these problems with their drives.

I hope you have a backup solution if they are that important to you :S

Dervious · 15 Sep 2014 at 21:41

littlepuppy said:
I would rather stick with Intel as you just dont seem to get these problems with their drives.

I`ve installed dozens of Samsung (and a few less Crucial) SSDs in various machines over the past 3 or 4 years. None of those have failed, or developed any noticeable problem.

I have only ever bought one Intel SSD (for myself). It suddenly failed after a couple of year's use.

I'm not suggesting that Intel SSDs are unreliable, but I am suggesting that it's luck of the draw.

It's probably a bit too early to judge Samsung on this. As far as I know they have only been made aware of this issue fairly recently. If they are working on a "fix" (and I hope they are), then it may not appear just yet. They may even still be trying to find the cause of the problem. I'll give them a few more weeks, and also keep an eye on my EVO for a while longer. If my SSD starts to produce poor benchmarks, I might just get in touch with them myself.

In the meantime, I`ve just ordered a 250GB EVO for a customer. I'm going to secure erase it before it gets used, then monitor it for a while.

wazza300 · 15 Sep 2014 at 22:54

nothing wrong with the pro and non evo ssd's either so don't write off Samsung completely !!!!

they are my #1 fave for hdd's/ssd's

Dervious · 16 Sep 2014 at 00:42

I'm not so sure it's just the Evos that have this problem.

After I finished work with a colleague earlier today, I checked out a laptop that I'd fitted with an Evo, and also the PC I had built for him, with an 840 non-Evo. As I suspected, the laptop was quite bad. I wasn't sure what I'd find with the non-Evo in the PC.

This was before I updated Intel RST, updated the 840's Firmware and used Samsung Magician's Performance Optimization.

After the updates.......

wazza300 · 16 Sep 2014 at 16:45

I didn't get that with my 840 non evo,ill check what fw though

Dervious · 16 Sep 2014 at 17:48

wazza300 said:
I didn't get that with my 840 non evo,ill check what fw though

It's all a bit odd.

It might have been that it was CPU usage affecting the first test, but the second test shows a similar patern. I forgot to mention that I checked the partition alignment, and that was fine.

I`ve just checked the "new" PC that I erase/restored just over a week ago. That is still performing well. I'm going to be testing a machine I built about six months ago a bit later today, it's a PC that gets quite a lot of use. I expect it to be "carnage"

. The customer has not noticed any drop in performance though.

accod · 17 Sep 2014 at 08:59

I've got two 250GB 840 EVO's in a linux box using software raid 1. It has been running since May. I just did some testing before and after wiping one of the drives and letting raid rebuild it:

Before rebuild, you can see both drives are quite slow:

Code:

# dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 12.5601 s, 83.5 MB/s
# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 16.2015 s, 64.7 MB/s

I then removed the sdb2 partition from the array, wiped it (dd zeros to it), added it back into the array, let it finish rebuilding, and cleared cache. Performance is now:

Code:

# dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1.97923 s, 530 MB/s
# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 15.7522 s, 66.6 MB/s

NB. The sda2 partition has not been touched so is still slow.

graphicequalise · 18 Sep 2014 at 15:09

Dervious, I know this is a bit of an imposition, but could you do a step-by-step guide to imaging, secure erasing, and re-imaging the EVO SSDs? What is the best to use? Samsung Magician, EaseUS Backup, or Partition magic?

Something along the lines of (please point out any mistakes, since I have not actually done this myself. I have only read the posts on this thread to glean this information) :-

1) Backup the Samsung EVO SSD drive. You can use EaseUS Todo Backup (free edition 7.0) to backup the disk/partition to a PBD file on another disk drive somewhere.

2) Make a boot medium which can read from the PBD file, and has recovery software on it to write the image to a barren SSD. EaseUS has an option to "Create Emergency Disk" under the Tools menu.

3) Check that the boot medium allows you to boot up and to restore the PBD file.

4) Erase the SSD. If it's your OS drive, use Samsung Magician to create a boot CD which erases the SSD. I am not sure about the options in EaseUS as to whether they can erase the OS SSD with OS running! If it complains about the SSD being in a frozen state, unplug the SATA power cable to the drive for a few seconds then replace it and hit "Yes" (or whatever) to try again.

5) Boot from the boot medium you created and checked before. Restore the PBD image to the SSD.

6) Boot from the SSD as normal and it should all be fine from now on. And hopefully, forever!

~Mike~ · 18 Sep 2014 at 15:40

Still no updates or action from Samsung then?

I doubt I will be buying a Samsung SSD in the future.

Dervious · 18 Sep 2014 at 19:56

graphicequalise said:
Dervious, I know this is a bit of an imposition, but could you do a step-by-step guide to imaging, secure erasing, and re-imaging the EVO SSDs? What is the best to use? Samsung Magician, EaseUS Backup, or Partition magic?

I'll be happy to do that, but I'm just about to carry out the process via TeamViewer (I must be mad !

) for a customer/friend who lives 150 miles away. I'll post something asap.

Although, having just read your own guide, it looks spot on.

The only thing I'll add is that in my experience the backup process is the "dangerous" bit. I`ve used both EaseUs and Macrium, and they both seem to do a decent job. I prefer EaseUs, as I find it's user interface is a little more friendly. However, for whatever reason, I have had issues with both. These issues are rare, and may well be machine specific. If you really don't fancy losing your data, or having to do a clean OS install, I'd suggest making a backup with both EaseUs and Macrium, just in case (don't forget to create and test bootable recovery media for both).

Good luck.