Samsung 840 Evo's New Reading Speed ​​Patch Released This Month

    The problem will be finally resolved by regularly rewriting the data.


    For six months now, the defect of the Samsung 840 Evo SSDs has remained in force, which leads to a decrease in the reading speed of old data. Last year, users began to complain that the read speed of information written to disk more than 30 days ago fell several dozen times. By the end of September, technical publications paid attention to the problem , and later the manufacturer himself . Came out

    in Octoberpatch Performance Restoration Tool to fix this problem. Then the South Korean giant said that eight states of three-bit cells were incorrectly calibrated. Months after the first fix, some 840 Evo owners faced the same problem of degradation, although this time it does not manifest itself so much. Samsung reports that as early as April of this year, a new version of the firmware with the periodic update function will be released.



    Samsung 840 Evo - drives from 120 gigabytes to 1 “honest” terabyte, available in form factors for connecting via SATA and mSATA. Immediately after the appearance, thanks to an aggressive pricing policy and good characteristics, they were one of the best solid-state for home use. After some time, users began to notice something strange: the data recorded a few months ago could no longer be read at full speed. So six months ago, the problem manifested itself.




    The 840 Evo uses a TLC NAND memory that stores 3 bits in a cell, which requires the correct calibration of eight voltage levels at once. As stated by representatives of Samsung, over time, these levels changed, and the firmware was not ready for this, so the controller made many requests, trying to read the information. (Fortunately, flash memory does not deteriorate from reading.) As a result, the speed of extracting data from cells older than 30 days fell to the level of 15-20 megabytes per second. The manufacturer reacted quickly, and by the end of October, the Performance Restoration Tool for Windows, OS X and Linux was released. The program updated the disk firmware and completely overwritten its contents.

    Then it was claimed that this patch completely fixes the problem, but this turned out to be wrong. Some users started reportingabout repeated subsidence of reading speed. Compared to the first case, the problems were not so strong - 400-450 MB / s dropped to about 150, but it became clear that the first attempt did not completely correct the situation. In February this year, Samsung acknowledged the problem and promised to release an update in March.

    A later message readthat a new utility will be released in late April. It will contain a tool for automatically periodically overwriting data to restore speed. After reaching a certain age, the data on the solid state will be overwritten. Samsung claims that this operation will be conducted in the background and will not affect the overall system performance. Before the first fix was released in October, some users solved the problem in the same way - by completely rewriting old data. This negatively affects the service life of the disk, but if the new firmware will do it once every few weeks or months and only for a small part of the drive, then the effect will be minimal.

    After the release of the new firmware can be obtained in the tool Samsung Magician 4.6. Only owners of 840 Evo need worry, no similar problems were found in the 840 and 850 Evo. An overview of the not yet released version 4.6 is already available on the PC Perspective website. The new firmware will add an automatic dubbing process that will take place during downtime without any user intervention. But if you need a forced recovery process (the disk has been disconnected for a long time or was heavily loaded), you should manually start Magician and perform the Advanced Performance Optimization operation. Fallen read speed on disk.





    Immediately after the upcoming firmware update, but before overwriting all the data. It is clearly seen that the new version significantly improves performance even before the process of updating data in cells. After a manual run of Advanced Performance Optimization in Magician 4.6. It is likely that by the end of the month or later, firmware updates and Samsung Magician 4.6 will be available at http://www.samsung.com/samsungssd/ . Updated 2015-05-13: The new firmware version is available as ISO images and in the Samsung Magician 4.6 utility at http://www.samsung.com/samsungssd/ .







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