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
SP3 SSD, possible firmware bug, same as just fixed in another Samsung drive.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Anonymous
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:
Surface | Surface Pro | Install and update
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Answer accepted by question author
Anonymous
151 additional answers
Sort by: Oldest
-
Anonymous
2014-10-30T11:14:44+00:00 Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting anyone else ran the DiskFresh tool and write 256Gb of data to their SSD. Just post the read performance graph as it is, so that we can see if OLD data that was written some time ago (OS and installed apps) has poor read performance (slow transfer and high access time).
If there really is an issue, I think it is specific to the Samsung MZMTExxxHMHP drives, which appear to be the OEM version of the Samsung 840 EVO drive, which has a known firmware bug, and a fix available from Samsung. They just don't seem to have acknowledged (or denied) it for this variant as yet.
-
Anonymous
2014-11-03T14:09:13+00:00 Is anybody else able to post an image of an HDTach or HDTune read performance test for their SP3? Just as it is, without any writing or refreshing. Just to see how well they are dealing with aging data like the OS.
-
Anonymous
2014-11-03T15:27:13+00:00 Here are two images, taken a couple of minutes apart, of my Samsung that has not had the refreshing done. The first one (faster) is on AC power and the second one (slower) is on battery. The drive is only 25% full, so all the areas with a nice even maximum speed in the graphs are likely areas where data has never ever been written to the drive.
This system is just over a month old. A Windows full refresh was done at the Microsoft store when I picked up the computer (something went wrong during the intial updating from Windows Update), so the operating system files were freshly written at that time. The only truly old data therefore is in the hidden partitions at the front (350MB Recovery plus 200MB EFI) and end (5GB Recovery) of the disk.
I notice the near-zero speeds at the start of the disk and the 50 MB/s speeds at the end of the disk and have seen them on several of these images of unrefreshed drives.
On AC:
On battery:
-
Anonymous
2014-11-05T15:22:15+00:00 Got my SP3 in early July: