In the fall it was confirmed by Samsung that stale data on some 840 EVO drives would suffer performance degradation and released a tool to mitigate the issue which Al reviewed here. The Tech Report recently heard of some cases of drives slowing even with the new EXT0CB6Q firmware installed and decided to investigate. They took a 840 EVO 250GB SSD which had been filled with files to test the patch and was then left forgotten on a shelf for several months and tested the speeds. The benchmarks showed an average speed between 35-54MB/s far below what you would expect to see from an SSD but in line with what users have been reported. On the other hand another 840 EVO which has been in constant use since the firmware update shows no signs whatsoever of slowing down, though NTFS compression was recently used on the drive which could have refreshed the flash. Obviously more testing needs to be done, keep your eyes out for updates on this new development.
"In October, Samsung patched its 840 EVO SSD to address a problem that caused slow read speeds with old data. Recent reports suggest the issue isn't completely fixed, and the results of our own testing agree."
Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:
- Plextor M6e Black Edition SSD @ The SSD Review
- OCZ Challenge update: All 5 ARC 100 SSD’s hit 200TB mark @ Kitgru
- Samsung's Portable SSD T1 @ The Tech Report
- Samsung Portable SSD T1 500GB @ Custom PC Review
- Samsung T1 SSD @ HardwareHeaven
- Samsung Portable SSD T1 @ The SSD Review
- Kingston SDCA3 microSDHC/SDXC UHS-I U3 Card @ The SSD Review
- Synology DiskStation DS215j 2-Bay NAS @ eTeknix
upgrade to the 850 EVO
upgrade to the 850 EVO
A hard drive (or ssd or
A hard drive (or ssd or whatever) is not a part that should need to be upgraded every generation. That’s a shit responce, you woudn’t be happy with, “Sorry you’re 12xxx video card gets lower frame-rates as it ages, buy a 13xxx”
“Shit response” is being
“Shit response” is being kind. So we should buy their newest iteration of a cheap ass tlc drive for too much money and then another one in a year?
Really though, what are we
Really though, what are we talking about here? 30-50MB in speed reduction – 5-10%? Must we continue to nitpick and obsess over every little thing? You were promised UP TO certain speeds, not a constant, forever guarantee of performance. If they can fix it, great, but we all knew several years ago about the basic write/rewrite behavior of NAND. It’s never going to be perfect.
Time to bring in the phase-change memory.
“Really though, what are we
“Really though, what are we talking about here? 30-50MB in speed reduction – 5-10%?”
Nope, we’re talking about a 400+ MB/s reduction _to_ 50 MB/s or less. That’s slower than a decade-old 500GB hard drive.
I see, I misread that as a
I see, I misread that as a 30-50MB reduction from peak. Carry on.
I did! and never bought an
I did! and never bought an evo! 840 pro and 850 pro in my system!
Something you CAN do, not
Something you CAN do, not something you NEED to do. We are talking about the product, not about personal needs/means.
Wow this, and now Nvidia, and
Wow this, and now Nvidia, and all the old problems with GPUs, and SSDs, the lawyers should be all over this. Well props go out to the error correction algorithms, but the controllers are going to need quad cores to keep that R/W speed up there. TLC and small process nodes don’t mix well, larger nodes and die stacking may work out.
Nothing beats tiered storage with SSDs moving old data to the HDD. SLC, and MLC does not have as much of a problem.
For sure Samsung may need to offer some extra warranty on these lemons.
Every time a new ssd with tlc
Every time a new ssd with tlc comes out Allyn makes it as if it is a great thing because it will bring prices down. All it does, like the skews in nvidia gpu’s, is offer us lower quality ssd’s for the current price of mlc ssd’s and result in higher prices for the mlc variants. Look at the price of the 850 pro these days. Ridiculous. Nvidia has us paying over $300 for their midrange card, but we accept that because they made their flagships so expensive, twice that, a few years ago. Too bad people are so easily manipulated. At least too bad for cheap motherfuckers like me who want value.
It’s not $300 if you mean the
It’s not $300 if you mean the GTX 960. It’s only $200.
The 960 is build around a
The 960 is build around a chip that would’ve ended up in the 100-150 range a couple of years ago, now it’s $200.
Using Gxx04s in high-end SKUs is just as bad, and now we’re happily paying $350 for a broken GPU that Nvidia flat out lied about.
And don’t get me started on AMD. They haven’t done anything with their GPUs in 3+ years. And that’s the ‘good’ side of their business, their CPUs now shooting for a solid decade of suck. (if their current plans pan out, which -spoiler alert- they wont)
I cringe every time Josh has to explain the usage case for APUs on the podcast, there are probably more SKUs out of AMD than there are scenarios where they are genuinely useful.
Getting back to the topic at hand, I’m just glad I didn’t get a TB 840 Evo when they were on sale for the holidays. These things turn out to be the Sandforce drives of this generation. 🙁
Couldn’t agree more. I
Couldn’t agree more. I remember the 8800 GTX being about £300, but now we’re looking at £450 for a GTX980 even though they’re at the same place in their respective hierarchies. The GTX970 is £300 for a midrange card and everyone is lapping it up like mindless idiots. You pay less for your hardware in the U.S. than us in Britain so it could be worse for you. I’
Nice to know there is finally
Nice to know there is finally someone other than myself who frequents this site that agrees with me. Thanks for the support.
I saw this 850 Pro 256GB
I saw this 850 Pro 256GB review http://thepcenthusiast.com/samsung-850-pro-ssd-review-256gb/ and performance looks promising. I’ll just wait for prices to go down. Another option would be 850 EVO but I just hope there won’t be any degradation with the 850 Evo’s just like what happened with the 840 Evo.s
I own a vanilla 840 500GB
I own a vanilla 840 500GB drive. I never saw the low read speed issue, instead I found my write speeds slowed down considerably. This was on a 1 yr old install of Windows 7. After about 16 months of that install I just wiped the SSD completely and started fresh and I’ve got full performance back. I might have to look elsewhere for my next SSD, perhaps to Intel.
Write speeds slowing is
Write speeds slowing is generally attributed to fragmentation of the flash. This is caused by things that do small random writes to files that are then left on the drive and not TRIMmed. Examples of this are P2P segmented downloads (bittorrent, Steam, etc). After files have been placed on the drive with those methods, subsequent sequential writes may be slower since the controller is then forced to defragment those flash blocks 'on the fly' as the new data is written.
Typical SSDs live in this balance of small writes causing fragmentation and larger writes acting to clean it up. A standard 840 is more susceptable to this as it has no SLC cache and uses TLC flash, which has a much slower write speed, which translates to slower performance when it is forced to shuffle data to defragment blocks of itself.
* Note the above is for *writes* – the 840 / 840 EVO slow down issue was specific to *reads*.
Nice Pic! Is that
Nice Pic! Is that professionally done or a selfie?
Candid shot actually.
Candid shot actually.
Basic computing 101,one or a
Basic computing 101,one or a few cache wasn’t cleaned .one of the first android tip os to go at the base level and clean cache lol.oh well!Can’t all be good like north Korea (Sony hack)
The benchmarks showed an
The benchmarks showed an average speed between 35-54MB/s far below what you would expect to see from an SSD but in line with what users have been reported.
The last word should be reporting. If a report is made then it is reported if people are making reports then they are reporting.
Nuf said.
The benchmarks showed an
The benchmarks showed an average speed between 35-54MB/s far below what you would expect to see from an SSD but in line with what users have been reported.
The last word should be reporting. If a report is made then it is reported if people are making reports then they are reporting.
Nuf said.
I have a 250GB 840 EVO in my
I have a 250GB 840 EVO in my gaming PC (alongside a 1TB HDD), PC is used every one to two days, honestly haven’t noticed any speed issues.
I did the build at the end of July. I ran the SSD Read Speed Tester tool from the original article, most of the older files are 186 days old (which adds up with when I built and installed Windows). Not sure when I ran the Samsung fixer tool, but I believe it was the week it was released.
The default results png file the tool creates, Rate (MB/s) ascending, note that most of the file sizes are <1MB & random ages;
http://i.imgur.com/0avgD5v.png
Thanks for posting this. It
Thanks for posting this. It appears your drive was corrected. The drives we have retested here at PCPer so far also seem to have been corrected and no longer slow down (more testing in progress). That doesn't discount that some people who used that tool are still seeing a slow down. We are currently researching that.
I have a 500GB 840 EVO that
I have a 500GB 840 EVO that seems to be working okay. No file on it is older than about 5-6 weeks though. Curious about what will happen in a couple of months.
Just avoid TLC flash, they
Just avoid TLC flash, they are far more expensive than MLC flash based SSDs when you consider the cost per TB written before the drive fails, all while offering less performance.
Just avoid TLC. I didn’t have
Just avoid TLC. I didn’t have time to properly test my 840 last round, but just spent an hour to collect some data. This is definitely not 840 EVO exclusive problem. It might as well be common to all TLC nands.
My post to the original overclock net thread with HD Tach results.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1507897/samsung-840-evo-read-speed-drops-on-old-written-data-in-the-drive/1570#post_23463778
“On the other hand another
“On the other hand another 840 EVO which has been in constant use since the firmware update shows no signs whatsoever of slowing down, though NTFS compression was recently used on the drive which could have refreshed the flash.”
My other speculation is the new firmware might have some sort of ‘defrag’ schedule to keep moving the data on the ssd just to mask the issue.
Just my speculation though.
That is pretty much the only
That is pretty much the only way to keep it functioning at full speed. NAND has voltage drifts as the cells do not make a perfect capacitor (one does not exist) The issue is with TLC, you have far less room to allow for a voltage drift, thus old data must be refreshed periodically. While you can increase the tolerance for voltage drift, you also increase the risk for uncorrectable errors.
Do you think that’s what the
Do you think that’s what the evo is doing then? Just moving data around in order to keep it fresh? If so Samsung has built a time bomb into the 840EVO.
I recently copied 45GB of application files (ISO, Rar, unpacked installions) from my 1TB 840EVO (corrected with Samsung tool) to my 1TB 850PRO and was seeing an average of around 120MB/s which at the time seemed really low. I chalked the slowdown up to the fact that the EVO only had 3GB of space left with no over provisioning but now i’m not too sure given this article.
I’m starting to wonder if i have a lemon on my hands. I should have known better than to buy 19nm TLC flash in the first place!
840 evos are slowing down
840 evos are slowing down again, while 840 non evos are still slow because samsung didnt bother to fix them at all…
when I remember how all “enthusiasts” on pc sites and forums were all recommending samsung like crazy (hur, cant go wrong with samsung ssd), exactly as all were recommending gtx970, I am disgusted
gone are the days when you could find real helpful pc enthusiast on the internet, you are much more likely to find some shill/astroturfer or sheep customer rationalizing his purchase out there these days
I just don’t see a problem
I just don’t see a problem here people.
Just rename the drive Samsung 970 EVO.
Oh, that’s a good one!
Oh, that’s a good one!
I see what you did there 😀
I see what you did there 😀
I C w0T U did THAR.
I C w0T U did THAR.
I’m using an 840 drive, and
I’m using an 840 drive, and so far so good. I have clients machines I built with 840 EVO’s and they are all happy. Will most people outside of the IT world even notice these performance issues? How many people who are not “computer literate” even ever going to know about this stuff?
They will when they transfer
They will when they transfer that stagnant data, and things are moving slower than a HDD, Why is this taking so damn long!
Maybe all SSD’s need to report their controller usage to the OS, so the user could monitor, maybe in some form of tray icon launcher, that can be clicked and display a real time graph, along with the percentage of error correction overall, and on a file by file basis.
TLC is not for me.
Before applying the fix:
Before applying the fix: http://i1.someimage.com/ToLDqSb.png (10-11 months 24/7 usage)
After applying the fix: http://i1.someimage.com/AI1GrQz.png
One month after applying the fix: http://i1.someimage.com/7VBO6uF.png (15 Nov 2014)
2 1/2 months after applying the fix: http://i1.someimage.com/g6QuGQq.png (27 Jan 2015)
I am using this SSD as a system disk in my main rig, 24/7.
Thanks for posting this. I
Thanks for posting this. I will include it in my data collecting efforts. I'm testing on my end and will work up a post on this soon. We are giving Samsung some time to respond to our request for a statement.
luckily i am on windows 10
luckily i am on windows 10 and therefor having new build’s quite often, since my 840evo is the boot drive it doesn’t have anything else on it most of the time, except for the game i am currently playing
I’ve been saying this for
I’ve been saying this for months now in chat, and no one was listening to me. I’m seeing massive slow downs in reads on my 840 raid. Initially my drives read at 1100 mbs. Now I’m getting reads from the same array as low as 300
Prior to putting these drives in raid, I ran the patch on both of them.
I currently use Plextor’s M5S
I currently use Plextor’s M5S 256GB, Micron’s Crucial MX100 512GB, Toshiba’s THNSNH GCST 512GB and ADATA’s Premier Pro SP610 512GB. I’ve had plans to get a Samsung unit sometime in the near future, so…what about 850s? Do they have same problems as these 840s? If so, then I’ll think about getting something else (probably a second MX100 or THNSNH).
Allyn, I’m having a very
Allyn, I’m having a very similar problem with 4 x Intel 330 SSDs
in a RAID 0. That workstation was in storage for 11 months, and
READs are terribly slow now. I’ll try to do some measurements
and share them with you, after I get a new cable modem installed
and network that workstation with the laptop I’m using to
write this message.
For example, I’m trying to do a drive image of the C: partition,
and after 1 hour of running Norton GHOST, it’s only about 55%
completed. This task normally takes about 7 minutes total.
Here is how one model 330 looked when brand new,
using Intel’s SSD Toolbox 3.12:
http://supremelaw.org/systems/intel/SMART.Details.SSD.1.JPG
MRFS