SP3 SSD, possible firmware bug, same as just fixed in another Samsung drive.

Anonymous
2014-10-20T22:49:51+00:00

I've just had to update the firmware in another device that had a Samsung 840EVO SSD because they had a serious firmware bug with it.  Out of curiosity I tested the Samsung drive in my Surface Pro 3 and it looks like it has exactly the same issue (the SP3 drive is closely related to the 840 series I believe, but an OEM version.

The test is simple, just look at the read rate across the drive.  Older data (OS, installed apps) suffered from terrible read performance after a month or so.  Newly written data is fine.

As you can see, much of the drive is down to 50MB/s now.  It should be a fairly level line right the way across at about 350+MB/s.  This test was run with AC power connected and nothing else running.

If this is the same issue as the 840EVO, the good news is it can be corrected with a firmware update and refresh of the data.  Bad news would of course be Microsoft need to look into it first, then get the Samsung engineers looking into it.

Perhaps some other people could run the test too, and post results.  Remember the drive needs to be a month or more old, so that the data can have been sitting there only being read during that time.

Further details of the bug and the fix that Samsung released can be found here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/samsung-releases-firmware-update-to-fix-the-ssd-840-evo-read-performance-bug

Surface | Surface Pro | Install and update

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Anonymous
2015-09-30T22:01:46+00:00

Hello all

We wanted to let you know that an update to resolve this is still being worked on.  Please continue to post your experiences and technical details.

Mod Edit: Samsung SSD Optimization Utility for Surface Pro 3 now available.

Best regards

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-09-25T07:02:07+00:00

    After running the pulled RC here are my test results.  Ran it twice, rebooting between runs.

    Post reboot test

    So some improvement but still far below the performance when the SSD was new. 

    Microsoft, please work with Samsung to release a proper firmware update.  Based on the lack of support, I currently can't recommend this product or its successor the Surface Pro 4.

    Incidentally:  Here are the Checksums for Samsung_PM851_Performance_Restoration_setup_v1.0_RC2.exe (not the zip) hosted on a google drive to earlier in this thread.

    MD5 Checksum: F5FFA2FC61E7E1F09E6D92E321B70887

    SHA-1 Checksum: A199936A22CC3F5CC515E97E8EAD21D273D31834

    SHA-256 Checksum: CE816345208716D16B17C9093983691B0254B0EB3BAA2640B50935F4BB6EBF93

    SHA-512 Checksum: 842B42269D25176E9F5372D28C86A9B48F3C97902F47421C34A953246D771024767A7F4A22703CC7D82059459EA52AFAC9E1D3764431DA57DCAF81D9B0F02020

    Generated by MD5 & SHA Checksum Utility @ http://raylin.wordpress.com/downloads/md5-sha-1-checksum-utility

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-09-11T00:18:02+00:00

    So It's been nearly a year now since I started this thread.

    On my SP3 I did install the firmware update while it was available, and I just checked the performance again this week, now with Windows 10 of course.

    On battery, the average speed was between 250 and 300Mb/s, which is not too bad.  Still quite a lot of variation across the drive but not terrible like it was before the firmware update.  I think it could be better but I'm happily using it everyday anyway.

    I think there should still be a proper response from Microsoft.  Clearly the original firmware does have a problem and they should push Samsung harder to release a proper, non-beta firmware update and the ideally push that out to affected systems through Windows Update, or at least something to offer it to users (it does take a while and there is a small risk to the data as it needs to read and then write back every cluster on the drive).

    Hopefully they will do better qualification testing on the SSD's that go into the SP4!

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-08-31T13:04:15+00:00

    Been over 2wks now, pretty rude of them to not even give you a status update, have you tried nudging them at all?

    I had informed them about the upgradeprocedure I succesfuly undertook. So maybe they consider the case to be closed. I have nudged them twice in the past weeks, though.

    Thanks for the clarification,

    Clearly a ****-house effort on their part, but, it doesn't really surprise me any more.

    BR.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-08-31T12:23:38+00:00

    Been over 2wks now, pretty rude of them to not even give you a status update, have you tried nudging them at all?

    I had informed them about the upgradeprocedure I succesfuly undertook. So maybe they consider the case to be closed. I have nudged them twice in the past weeks, though.

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