Samsung was the clear leader in SSD shipments last year

[HEXUS]

Its SSD business generated twice the revenue of second placed Intel.

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[jinjur]

Despite the fact that what, say at least 50% of these SSD's (yes, I am looking at you EVO 840) shipped with borked firmware and serious design flaws.....

Wonder how a customer satisfaction survey would stack up against their "super-duper" success story

J

[DemonHighwayman]

Despite the fact that what, say at least 50% of these SSD's (yes, I am looking at you EVO 840) shipped with borked firmware and serious design flaws.....

Wonder how a customer satisfaction survey would stack up against their "super-duper" success story

J

As far as I understand, the 840 evo was the only model affected. Last year I bought an 850 pro and an 840 evo and both are still working well slightly over a year later. It's just sad that tech review sites can't find these flaws before the reviews are published.

[crossy]

Despite the fact that what, say at least 50% of these SSD's (yes, I am looking at you EVO 840) shipped with borked firmware and serious design flaws.....

I think you're over-reacting a bit. Yes, the 840 EVO had firmware revisions that didn't perform that well after a while, and Samsung didn't exactly cover themselves in glory by issuing a fix, then a fix for that fix.

Apart from the read/perf firmware fiasco, the EVO's seem to have been received quite well. And the two I've got (120GB and 500GB for OS and apps respectively) perform well enough that I've no complaints. The Anandtech article that I read last year said:

The EVO has been the most popular retail SSD so far, so it's great to see Samsung providing a fix in such a short time. None of the big SSD manufacturers have been able to avoid widespread bugs (remember the 8MB bug in the Intel SSD 320 and the 5,000-hour bug in the Crucial m4?) and I have to give Samsung credit for handling this well. In the end, this bug never resulted in data loss, so it was more of an annoyance than a real threat.

As to "serious design flaws", a quick Google search didn't throw up anything of that nature. So care to share?

Wonder how a customer satisfaction survey would stack up against their "super-duper" success story

100% satisfied customer of the 830 (non-Pro) units and the two 840EVO's seem to be okay. Although, even I'd knock off some marks for (a) having big scary warning on the firmware updater that doing this will erase the drive (other people have told me that it doesn't actually) and (b) the afore-mentioned less-than-professional handling of the read firmware bug.

Would I buy an 850EVO or 850Pro - probably. If not them, then probably something from Crucial or Sandisk - I like the idea that the device maker is using their own flash.

Now, if you wanted a customer satisfaction survey for Windows, on the other hand, then I'll get the poison pen out.

[kingpotnoodle]

I bought an 850 Pro to replace an ageing Crucial M4 and I must say it's very fast, the Samsung Magician toolbox is the industry leader IMHO, RAPID mode does make a difference and the optimisation checks and one click over-provisioning are great features for people who wouldn't know how do those things otherwise.

The 840 Evo has some issues and I'm rather put off TLC NAND because of that at the moment, when it comes to cheaper drives I'm mostly buying Crucial BX/MX but must test the 840 Evo in my work PC actually.

[shaithis]

As someone who has 2 x 250GB 830s and had 2 x 64GB <insert name of first gen drives!> that are still working fine in other peoples systems, I wouldn't think too hard before buying another Sammy SSD....

Although saying that, if it wasn't for the 840EVO issues, I wouldn't have even thought about it. That has sewn a seed of doubt in my mind and after using my brothers MX100 recently, I might look at crucial if I was looking for another cheap SSD, although I have also been very happy with my 4 x 250GB Corsair Force 3 drives, which were a gamble when I purchased them due to the Sandforce controller in them (got them for £105 each when 250GB SSDs were ~£150), although they have been rock solid and even spent a while as a RAID5 array.....

Bottom line, as with all purchases you take your chances!

I do feel that some companies have fallen foul of their own success by reducing QC to get stuff out faster, maybe Samsung are guilty of that here, who knows?

[yeeeeman]

I've got a 840PRO 256GB and it's freaking good. It's so fast that GTA V on the same system:
- continously stuttering with 2GB of RAM and a 500GB HDD (swap on HDD)
- silky smooth on the same system with the swap on the SSD.
Ah, and without swap it doesn't even run, so the swap is truly needed. Oh, and after an hour play time with the swap enabled on the ssd, the reads amount was at 500GB level. Wow!

[spl]

Despite the fact that what, say at least 50% of these SSD's (yes, I am looking at you EVO 840) shipped with borked firmware and serious design flaws.....

I think you're over-reacting a bit. Yes, the 840 EVO had firmware revisions that didn't perform that well after a while, and Samsung didn't exactly cover themselves in glory by issuing a fix, then a fix for that fix.

Apart from the read/perf firmware fiasco, the EVO's seem to have been received quite well. And the two I've got (120GB and 500GB for OS and apps respectively) perform well enough that I've no complaints. The Anandtech article that I read last year said:

The EVO has been the most popular retail SSD so far, so it's great to see Samsung providing a fix in such a short time. None of the big SSD manufacturers have been able to avoid widespread bugs (remember the 8MB bug in the Intel SSD 320 and the 5,000-hour bug in the Crucial m4?) and I have to give Samsung credit for handling this well. In the end, this bug never resulted in data loss, so it was more of an annoyance than a real threat.

Actually mate, Samsung lied about that fix. Said it was permanent, but it became apparent around the beginning of this year that the fix was only temporary and actually achieved no more than would be achieved running Diskfresh on your drive. Data will only read at full speed up to around two months after it has been written (or re-written by Diskfresh). By three months, rates will be significantly lower (old data on mine dropped to 160MB/s from over 400MB/s when freshly-written).

As far as I'm aware, Samsung still haven't delivered a proper fix (I'm on latest firmware). I've accepted that to maintain full performance, I'll have to run Diskfresh every couple of months and burn through my meager P/E cycles far faster than I should be doing. And I suspect that this problem may be the design flaw jingur was referring to! I may be wrong but I suspect the problem is a physical flaw in the TLC NAND that Samsung is unable to correct via software. I'm not sure why else it still isn't fixed.

[crossy]

As far as I'm aware, Samsung still haven't delivered a proper fix (I'm on latest firmware). I've accepted that to maintain full performance, I'll have to run Diskfresh every couple of months and burn through my meager P/E cycles far faster than I should be doing. And I suspect that this problem may be the design flaw jingur was referring to! I may be wrong but I suspect the problem is a physical flaw in the TLC NAND that Samsung is unable to correct via software. I'm not sure why else it still isn't fixed.

That might be true or it might not - I'm not in a position to say. Like I said, I'm happy with the performance of my 840EVO's, and definitely wholly satisfied by the earlier 830's.

Oh and you're wrong about jingur - I stand by my accusation of "over reaction". Sure the 840EVO's aren't the best for long term use (especially if you're CrystalMark'ng them every couple of weeks!) but - as noted above - there's other models like the Pro's that seem to be highly regarded. Hence to say that "50% of those SSDs shipped with borked firmware and serious design flaws" is not sustainable unless you know what percentage of Samsung's total SSD production last year has been 840EVO's.

[spl]

Yeah the 840 Evo is the only screwup I'm aware of. 830 has a spotless record, as does the 840 Pro. Too early to say whether or not the 850s can be trusted, given that the 840 Evo issues didn't become widely known until a year after launch. I'd be more inclined to trust the 850 Pro than the 850 Evo but I wouldn't touch either personally.

As owners of 840s and 840 Evos we were effectively guinea pigs for a new NAND technology whose only benefit is a reduction in production costs (which wasn't passed onto the customer). I'll stick to tried and tested MLC drives that aren't trying anything new. It's not like any of these exciting new technologies have actually resulted in noticeable real-world performance improvements anyway!

[spl]

Incase anyone hasn't heard the latest and / or would appreciate a concise summary of the whole thing:

http://www.techspot.com/article/997-...ce-degradation

Also evidence that the non-EVO 840s are also affected (though the performance takes far longer to start dropping off). Seems it is indeed a NAND flaw, so there's unfortunately no nice solution (but there is a not-so-nice solution that I'll personally steer clear of).