Samsung Ssd 840 Evo Performance Restoration Software Dos
Oct 22, 2014 - Samsung has launched a tool for resolving a nasty performance-killing bug in its 840 Evo and 840 Evo mSATA solid-state storage devices, which includes a firmware update to fix the flaw and a calibration tool for restoring performance to existing data.
Figure I'd take the time to make folks aware: » » » The firmware update, as of this writing, comes in the form of a Windows application that both updates the drive firmware as well as moves series of NAND pages around on the drive. Look for Samsung SSD 840 EVO Performance Restoration Software on the below page: » I've used this on my own Samsung 840 EVO drive (250GB, used for OS), doing read benchmarks before and after. Since it's my OS drive and I don't tend to use it for many writes, I noticed that the read performance near the start of the drive (e.g.
Files that were written at the time of OS installation and probably not used much since) was quite bad - maybe 25-35MBytes/sec tops. After the software finished running, everything is back up at 375MBytes/sec range. Sorry I didn't take screenshots.:/ I should note that my (non-EVO) Samsung 840 SSD did not require an update, nor was it adjusted in any way - more importantly, it does not (in my experience) appear to suffer from the bug that the EVO series does/did, but I also tend to use that drive much more heavily (for both reads and writes) than my OS drive, so take what I say here in this paragraph with a bit of salt. I've a FreeBSD system with a Samsung 840 EVO (250GB) drive to update as well, once Samsung releases a bootable ISO.
I wonder the same thing (my 2nd drive is a standard 840, but it doesn't show this kind of problem). I'm inclined to believe (as of this writing) that Samsung may have introduced a bug/quirk in the EVO firmware which did not exist in the non-EVO version, regardless of the fact that both drives are TLC. Meaning: prior to EVO's release-to-market, some programmer somewhere within the company decided to change some part of the algorithm (which was working fine on the 840) without thinking his/her changes through.
Samsung doesn't exactly have a very good track record with their overall engineering with NAND products (I knew this in advance of purchasing their drives anyway): ». It affects any 'long-standing data' (e.g. Any data written to LBAs on the drive and after that haven't been marked as rewritable or erasable), regardless of the OS used. The referenced articles should be fairly clear about 'what' gets affected. The Windows-based application very likely moves lots of data around, and to do so safely while Windows is running, would have to mark areas of the drive as preallocated via the filesystem, then move data around, rinse lather repeat, thus tickling wear levelling algorithms to store data in alternate NAND pages.
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Samsung Ssd 840 Evo Performance Restoration Software Dosbox
The 'Performance Optimisation' feature of Samsung Magician 4 already effectively does this (only necessary for use on XP and Vista due to lack of TRIM), in the same manner as. I'll be interested to see how they deal with this under non-Windows OSes. My gut feeling is that it'll be a bootable ISO that boots into FreeDOS, does a firmware update, and proceeds to read a series of LBAs into memory + then write them back to the same LBAs as before (and pray nothing goes wrong during that time), thus tickling wear levelling as mentioned above. I don't see how else they'd be able to do it through standard ATA CDBs. But there's probably other stuff going on under the hood that's proprietary as well, but heck if I know, I don't work at Samsung. Said by: The Windows-based application very likely moves lots of data around, and to do so safely while Windows is running, would have to mark areas of the drive as preallocated via the filesystem, then move data around, rinse lather repeat, thus tickling wear levelling algorithms to store data in alternate NAND pages.While I was running the Samsung Performance Restoration Tool on my system I noticed some interesting things while it worked.
The HDD activity LED on the front of my computer's desktop case wasn't blinking during the operation. Windows 8.1's Task Manager didn't recognize that anything was being done to the SSD during the operation.
I would've thought that my HDD activity LED would have been blinking like a Christmas tree and that the Windows 8.1 Task Manager would have been showing something during the operation but it wasn't. Something must have been going on so my thinking that the moving of the data in the SSD to restore performance was probably being done by the internal SSD NAND flash controller chip as versus the program itself. The program was just instructing the on-board SSD NAND flash controller chip to do whatever magic it needed to be done via proprietary ATA commands. While running Finished! Wanted to follow up with my experience updating another SSD, this time from Samsung's native bootable ISO (which boots some form of DOS) since it's been released. I should note the filesystems on the SSD were UFS/FFS (i.e. Please be sure to read (not skim) Samsung's PDF instructions first!
Things went smoothly and without a hitch. I didn't have to change controller modes (i.e.
Keeping AHCI enabled was perfectly fine). The bootloader appears to use ISOLINUX and loads some form of DOS. The firmware upgraded very quickly (others cited concerns but it seems to be part for the course). The 'performance restoration' phase took about 7 minutes (you can see the timestamps in the screenshot), and happened in 2 phases. Periods/dots printed in the 2nd phase were slower and took a while to get started, but eventually did. Just be patient.
The system kicks you back to a DOS prompt when finished. I recommend powering off the system, letting things sit for about 15 full seconds, then powering back on, solely to ensure the drive operates off the new firmware. No data loss or issues encountered post-upgrade.
I did, however, notice that SMART tests (e.g. Short/selective/etc.) no longer print a valid power-on-hours value in the self-test log when finished - the firmware instead chooses to store 0. Don't ask me why that is, but developer gut feeling says it's probably the result of some in-flux development code that got included in the release to the world (I can only imagine the chaos over at Samsung when this issue came to light).
This shouldn't impact 98% of users, but for those of us that do drive analysis and use SMART tests a lot it's something to take note of. I took a couple pictures with my mobile phone as things were upgrading, so people could see what it looked like. Said by: The HDD activity LED on the front of my computer's desktop case wasn't blinking during the operation.
Windows 8.1's Task Manager didn't recognize that anything was being done to the SSD during the operation.They seem to have made a new version of the software (the Windows one is now labeled v1.1 while the bootable ISO is v1.0). I just ran the v1.1 Windows utility on my system and saw the exact opposite, the drive activity light on my case was on solid and Windows 8's task manager showed considerable periods of 100% disk activity. The utility has also changed slightly, it now does three passes of optimization instead of two (I don't recall seeing if the Windows utility did two or three originally but I do see the ISO does two so I'm assuming the Windows utility did two originally). I've attached screenshots of task manager while running and the utility after running to show the three passes. Said by: I did, however, notice that SMART tests (e.g.
Short/selective/etc.) no longer print a valid power-on-hours value in the self-test log when finished - the firmware instead chooses to store 0.I wondered about this when I noticed the version number change and now see the firmware number has changed. Mine is currently reporting 44 for power-on hours, which would be about right since I installed it about two day ago. Well, I say the firmware has changed but after closer inspection I see that's probably a 'before' shot as it didn't reboot after the update (and the number in your pic is the current firmware for the 840 EVO as released in December 2013). This is of course pulled from their software and not a 3rd party software so take it with a grain of salt as it may not have updated after the firmware update. Said by: I did, however, notice that SMART tests (e.g. Short/selective/etc.) no longer print a valid power-on-hours value in the self-test log when finished - the firmware instead chooses to store 0.I wondered about this when I noticed the version number change and now see the firmware number has changed.
Mine is currently reporting 44 for power-on hours.You've misunderstood what I was referring to. I was not talking about SMART attributes, I was talking about SMART tests.