Samsung SSDs Dying! 980 Pro, 990, 970 EVO PLUS, PM9A1 And More

[adamsleath]

I had a number of SSD's fail, and I think they were all 870's. What was very suspicious about the failures was the way they failed and the fact that even when utterly broken, Samsung Magician still said they were OK.
To this day, I don't know what was wrong with them, other than they really slowed down. Eventually to a point where certain operations would never complete. Yet they checked out just fine and had a small amount of use.
This is not the first batch of Samsung drives that have done this. I, certainly, am not finding them as reliable as they are supposed to be.

interesting anecdote.

i can surmise. only. that there are occasional bad batches off the assembly lines (or even just singular bad samples). whether it is the memory cells or the controllers or any of the other fiddly bits on the pcb's.

some engineers would know better.
as customers can do the warranty thing if it still applies within the warranty period.

bad samples can pass tests earlier on as they are tested prior to delivery. but end up being marginal cases i suppose, in that they pass basic testing then can fail soon after. i'm not saying anything new that i haven't heard before.

my own experiences of the least reliable parts have been motherboards. most other items I have / had typically lasted around 10 yrs or longer. ive heard anecdotes of some people still using older motherboards, and yet others that have replaced a few components and they function yet again.

I got an early crucial ssd circa 2008. 128GB it showed errors after 10 years. thing is ssd's have only been around since about then in the consumer market. and newer ones are stacking the cells increasing the density, and also running hotter. `used to be generally said that SLC was the most reliable, then MLC TLC QLC - in decreasing order of Endurance. now there is V-nand (stacked vertically)

Ushering in the era of consumer SSDs | Samsung Semiconductor Global

Welcome to part three of our in-depth series exploring landmark moments from Samsung’s history of flash memory innovation.

semiconductor.samsung.com

 

[Tetras]

bad samples can pass tests earlier on as they are tested prior to delivery. but end up being marginal cases i suppose, in that they pass basic testing then can fail soon after. i'm not saying anything new that i haven't heard before.

In the case of the 870 Evo, what appears to happen is that the drive slowly corrupts itself and either damages the flash, or it exposes existing bad flash, since the data in those sectors goes from mostly readable to nearly unreadable and produces loads of ECC uncorrectable errors.

For some reason, software would tend to ignore the bad blocks and uncorrectable errors in the overall health report of the drive, unless they reached abominable proportions and unless someone did a full scan of the drive it didn't pick up how much of the data on it was corrupted.

Samsung have never made a formal statement on the 870 Evo issues (that I have seen), but I believe they have suggested to some customers that the problem was resolved with a firmware update, but this does not fix existing damage (e.g. reserved blocks remain used and corrupted data will always be unreadable/nearly unreadable).

The firmware update has certainly not stopped all drives from failing, but it might have been that they were too badly damaged at that point to be recoverable. Samsung don't manufacture these drives with the same process anymore (at least, it says so on their website), so presumably newer 870 Evo drives are unaffected, but earlier drives still continue to fail.

 

[adamsleath]

i got an 870 evo fairly recently 2TB. just a backup. so really it isnt being used. write once. sits on shelf.
recently bought (yet another) wd black 1tb and a 870 qvo 1 tb. same thing just back up drives.

i recall doing a firmware thing to the crucial ssd i mentioned. its all history. drive is obsolete / old. showing errors. gonski.

there are larger hdd's available. ...but i tend not to go to higher capacity ones because i dont need that much storage., plus drives have x amount of life then theyre gone. the wdblack 1tb hdd makes my fourth. still have others that are less than 10 yrs old. they are all good. (well apparently they are)

in retrospect i probably shouldnt have gone with the 870 evo. but i dont know. the qvo should theoretically have higher endurance. also a reason i still use hdd's they have proven to be reliable for me. despite being mechanical in nature. the weakest link in the chain principle applies to devices.

in terms of gen4. hmm. while there are gen 3's still available i think ill stick with them for now. I use these things until they show problems. as ive gotten older. speed is less important to me than reliability.