Assistance - Calling all Samsung EVO owners

I was going to post something like "everything seems to be fine" a couple of days ago, but it's probably a bit too soon to tell for sure.

However, it does look like full performance has been restored, and is staying.

No dramatic increase in "total bytes written" either, unless that's being purposely ignored. Looks like Samsung have fixed the issue this time.
 
MadMatty said:
So one month on after installing the new firmware, it seems the fix really was a fix this time and looks pretty much the same as it did one month ago.
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It is "a" fix but it does so in a brute force manner - leave the system idle for a bit and performance will be right back up where it should be. I'm guessing additional writes are masked from the OS though :S
 
Rroff said:
It is "a" fix but it does so in a brute force manner - leave the system idle for a bit and performance will be right back up where it should be. I'm guessing additional writes are masked from the OS though :S
Click to expand...

It really doesn't matter how the fix works, as long as -

The SSD lasts a reasonable amount of time before "wearing out" (I'll be happy with ~5 years or more).

Performance is maintained.

You can worry yourself about the fact that there was a performance issue, and it's had to be fixed by firmware (which refreshes slow data once in a while). Or you can carry on using your 840 EVO which is making your machine run pretty well as fast as most other SSDs on the market, probably cost less than most other SSDs on the market, and still has well over 12 months warranty left.
 
Interesting.

There appears to be a version 4.6 of magician and newer firmware for the 840 EVO!

How come Magician version 4.5 doesn't tell you about these updates???

Am I missing something here???
 
Installing 4.6 and updating the firmware is advisable to fix your performance issue :) Magician itself doesn't automatically prompt you to update to 4.6, you need to do it yourself, though it will suggest the firmware once you're on 4.6
 
David Bisset said:
Installing 4.6 and updating the firmware is advisable to fix your performance issue :) Magician itself doesn't automatically prompt you to update to 4.6, you need to do it yourself, though it will suggest the firmware once you're on 4.6
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I do wonder why Samsung don't provide a prompt for the upgrade to 4.6, like they seem to have done for previous Magician updates.
 
David Bisset said:
Installing 4.6 and updating the firmware is advisable to fix your performance issue :) Magician itself doesn't automatically prompt you to update to 4.6, you need to do it yourself, though it will suggest the firmware once you're on 4.6
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Thanks for that, appreciated. Sort of worked that out in the end myself. Would have thought Samsung would have pushed this fix a bit harder. Be prepared to bet that a lot of folks just are not aware of the issue, let alone that it needs a fix (or should that be "another fix"). Even if the SSD is still pretty fast in it's original state, that's not the issue... I paid for a certain level of performance and to be totally honest, that's what I expect to receive.

After 4.6 install and advanced optimization:



Lets see how this goes after a couple of months.

Dervious... thanks for the mildly amusing comment :) Pedantic, but correct of course :):)
 
I did think it odd samsung didn't prompt - for a bit I thought it may be due to 4.6 only containing changes for the 840 evo and perhaps their update mechanism doesn't make the distinction and they didn't want loads of users not on the 840 evo to have to update unnecessarily but now I'm unconvinced, as since when have companies cared about that. *shrug* I guess everyone in this thread knows about it so we're ok, but it's kinda rough on those who don't stumble over it. Maybe they'll eventually bundle it into a future magician release or something.

Then again, probably lots of people don't use magician either.
 
After 33 days. It seems to be holding thus far

OlTTunU.png
 
Dervious said:
It really doesn't matter how the fix works, as long as -

The SSD lasts a reasonable amount of time before "wearing out" (I'll be happy with ~5 years or more).

Performance is maintained.

You can worry yourself about the fact that there was a performance issue, and it's had to be fixed by firmware (which refreshes slow data once in a while). Or you can carry on using your 840 EVO which is making your machine run pretty well as fast as most other SSDs on the market, probably cost less than most other SSDs on the market, and still has well over 12 months warranty left.
Click to expand...

As of yet how much it impacts on the long term life of the SSD isn't confirmed so I don't think it unreasonable to be concerned by that aspect.

I also bought the HyperX 3K upgrade kit version for at the time less than the 840 EVOs were costing it pretty much performs identically to the EVO on its (the EVO's) good days without any of the concerns about performance degradation so the EVO doesn't really have that much going for it.
 
Rroff said:
As of yet how much it impacts on the long term life of the SSD isn't confirmed so I don't think it unreasonable to be concerned by that aspect.

I also bought the HyperX 3K upgrade kit version for at the time less than the 840 EVOs were costing it pretty much performs identically to the EVO on its (the EVO's) good days without any of the concerns about performance degradation so the EVO doesn't really have that much going for it.
Click to expand...

Well I'm not concerned about my EVO. It's fast, and I have only ever had to RMA one 840 EVO, which failed after a secure erase. I bought mine virtually as soon as they became available, August 2013, so it still has over a year left on it's warranty. I might be wrong, but I don't think the latest fix is continuously re-writing data. Even if every bit of memory is re-written once a month, that's about 3TB per year on my 250GB drive. I suppose I could complain or be concerned about that, but I never expected to own this SSD for more than about 10 years anyway.

BTW, Magician is reporting 5.6TB of data written after nearly 2 years of a fairly busy life (including 2 or 3 Windows 7 installs and a few erase/restores while waiting for Samsung to fix the issue). If the fix does add an extra 3TB per year, it will obviously reduce the lifespan of the SSD. Will this be a problem to me ? I don't think so.

http://ssdendurancetest.com/ssd-endurance-test-report/Samsung-840-EVO-120
 
9.22TB Written on mine - had it about 18 months and that doesn't include when I cloned the whole drive back and/or any writes from the performance restoration tools which doesn't appear to have been recorded.

Combined with a reallocated sector count of 250 (reserved block use) and 36016 uncorrectable error/ecc counts I'm not exactly inspired by this drive... due to the perform degradation the firmware was prematurely failing blocks, etc. and some locations had got so bad it was kicking the error correction, etc. stuff in the teeth and required cloning, secure erasing and rewriting all the data to get it working properly again never mind then topping it up with the performance restoration stuff.
 
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