Update on Samsung SSD 840/840 Pro Failures
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 28, 2012 12:06 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Samsung
- Samsung SSD 840
In our review of Samsung's SSD 840 Pro I noted that my drive died shortly after I completed testing. Samsung sent me a replacement, which also stopped working (although it still pulled current) after a couple of days. Kristian's Samsung SSD 840 review sample shared a similar fate.
I spoke with Samsung about this problem a couple of weeks ago and was told that there was a bug in the pre-production firmware (version 2B0Q/5B0Q for 840 Pro/840) loaded on our drives. All retail samples should ship with a newer firmware revision (3B0Q/6B0Q) that have this bug fixed. To confirm what firmware revision is on your drive, look at the end of the hardware id string for the SSD in Device Manager.
Samsung sent me an 840 Pro with the updated firmware and so far I haven't had any issues. I'm trying to retrace my steps in bricking the drive and things are looking good thus far. As always, if things change I will update you all.
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Araemo - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
The "encryption" on all these drives sucks. Much like sandforce, most of the drives are full-time encrypted, and you can use a ATA password (usually set via the bios) to 'lock' the drive so that it cannot load the encryption key unless you supply the ATA password.However, That is a single password supplied during BIOS/EFI-level boot, so the integration with any kind of actual encryption software is completely nonexistant, and the drive looks like an unencrypted drive to the OS.
Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
lolwut?Why does that suck? Without the hard drive password, there's absolutely no chance of anyone accessing your data, even if they disassemble the drive and read each flash chip separately. That sounds like an ideal solution to me.
I agree that there are cases where someone wants some form of "plausible deniability", but I would imagine that many users will be content knowing that their data is inaccessible to anyone with physical access to their devices.
Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
I want to second this. I'm strongly considering an 840 Pro for my ThinkPad based on the ability to use hardware encryption and I'd really like to know how well it works, any possibly caveats, and whatnot. The ThinkPad does support hard drive passwords and I'd like to have a dual-boot Windows/Linux setup.Beenthere - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
FYI - The Plextor M5P is also reported to support 128 encryptionbse8128 - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
My 830 recently showed strange behaviour. It looked like all IOs had a latency of ~8-9 milliseconds. 4K random IO was down to < 200 iops according to AS-SSD while the "4K-64Thrd" value looked normal.I found a few other reports of this strange behaviour. It's not fixable by secure-erasing.
Who knows how many of those drives are out there. I guess not everyone will even notice this.
Impulses - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
So what'd you do, send it in for warranty replacement?bse8128 - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
Yes, but only recently, I haven't got a replacement yet.Kogies - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
I have an 830 (64gb) in an old Atom netbook. I am about to begin testing, it seems slower than the mechanical hard drive that was in there, which frankly doesn't seem right!Swede(n) - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
Anand,It would be somewhat interesting if the behaviour of TRIM has changed with the Firmware 3B0Q/6B0Q compared to when You tested it the first time with the older firmware.
Sincerely
cbf - Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - link
SCSI\DiskSamsung_SSD_840_PRO_SeriDXM0SCSI\DiskSamsung_SSD_840_PRO_Seri
SCSI\DiskSamsung_
SCSI\Samsung_SSD_840_PRO_SeriD
Samsung_SSD_840_PRO_SeriD
GenDisk
So which firmware do I have?