850 EVO life span question

[moonbogg]

My MX200 500GB 2260 SSD I got with my new Skylake build now got 1.62TB written. You always use more in the beginning when you essentially flood the drive with all your junk and stuff.

I got over 1000 power on hours for it already. It says 1% lifetime used (tho we know it can got multiple times over it). Even by that measure, it got 16-24 years left with current usage.

SSDs are good at reporting numbers, giving the "SSD hysterica" cases. People would dump HDs left and right in panic if they saw expected numbers there.

Yeah I'm hoping that's all it is. It magician is reliable, then my 830 only has a little over 5TB written and I've had it for several years as an OS and games drive.

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

I've been conversing with a technician at Ace Labs (the makers of PC3000) and they have found this too. Apparently, they setup 8 EVOs 4 months in advance for data recovery training and when training day came, 3 of 8 lost the root catalog and files were corrupted. 2 months later, they were up to 5 of the 8 being virtually unrecoverable.

If I understand correctly, these were new drives that all had about 40GB of data dumped to them for training purposes, then set aside for training day. I have one on my shelf that I am going to setup today for a test of my own.

However, the case I just finished seems to have confirmed this theory nicely and it certainly explains why these drives were having so many slow down issues before the firmware "fix" that Samsung released.

If any of you have one of these drives to spare, it might be worth your testing the drive too. Let's all copy data to these drives, I'm thinking of filling mine about 50%, then see what happens. If the theory stands, after sitting a month or two, there will be bad sectors in the used data sectors and none in the unused portion of sectors.

Nordichardware has already done something similar.

After using 4600 write cycles, 3600 more than it is rated for they let it sit for two months without power.
And after those two months they checked the 75GB worth of data they had left on the drive with MD5 hashes.
The hashes matched.

The 850 EVO actually did not pass the test despite having more write cycles but that seems more like a reason to recommend not using twice as many write cycles as an SSD is rated for rather than necessarily revealing a weakness in the 850 EVO.


So I am a bit skeptical to the idea that an 840 EVO which has seen little wear is going to lose data that quickly even if the read speed does slow down dramatically.

Link here if you want to read: http://www.nordichardware.se/SSD-Re...d-aer-doed-efter-1-petabyte-skriven-data.html

 

[Puffnstuff]

I was thinking about replacing my primary wd black hd with a 850 evo to keep my programs on and this information has me a little bit concerned about that line of drives.

 

[Glaring_Mistake]

I was thinking about replacing my primary wd black hd with a 850 evo to keep my programs on and this information has me a little bit concerned about that line of drives.

What makes you concerned about the 850 EVO?

 

[moonbogg]

I was thinking about replacing my primary wd black hd with a 850 evo to keep my programs on and this information has me a little bit concerned about that line of drives.

Well everyone sais there is nothing to worry about regarding lifespan of the 850 EVO. Anandtech's review sais absolutely nothing to worry about, people in this thread say absolutely nothing to worry about, other review sites say nothing to worry about, of course Samsung sais there's nothing to worry about, so I am going with the idea that there is probably nothing to worry about. Plus its fast as hell.

 

[Elixer]

Well everyone sais there is nothing to worry about regarding lifespan of the 850 EVO. Anandtech's review sais absolutely nothing to worry about, people in this thread say absolutely nothing to worry about, other review sites say nothing to worry about, of course Samsung sais there's nothing to worry about, so I am going with the idea that there is probably nothing to worry about. Plus its fast as hell.

Anandtech has never done long term testing, and I doubt they will start that now.
It would be some good case study to see what happens with 10 brands of SSDs are filled to X%, then stuff them in a storage locker for a few months, then check the hashes of the files, and see if they match.

Techreport did some write abuse, which isn't really a issue, as those tests show, unless, they exceed multiple of 10'sGB of data per day which most consumers will never do.
If they also put those tests on hold for a few months, and come back to them, to see if the data is still 100% correct, that would have been more beneficial.

 

[RussianSensation]

I've only had this drive a few days and already is shows .62TB total writes. That's just from installing windows and transferring a few games. Total lifespan is said to be 150TB. That's like about 1.5 years until dead at this pace.

You'll be glad to know that the TB lifespan on the box is a conservative estimate. "After receiving a black mark on its permanent record, the 840 Series sailed smoothly up to 800TB. But it suffered another spate of uncorrectable errors on the way to 900TB, and it died without warning before reaching a petabyte."

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

By the time your 850 EVO dies, my guess is you'll be upgrading to something newer and/or faster anyway.

Well everyone sais there is nothing to worry about regarding lifespan of the 850 EVO. Anandtech's review sais absolutely nothing to worry about, people in this thread say absolutely nothing to worry about, other review sites say nothing to worry about, of course Samsung sais there's nothing to worry about, so I am going with the idea that there is probably nothing to worry about. Plus its fast as hell.

0.30% return/failure rate for 500GB 850 EVO.
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/944-7/ssd.html

That's more reliable than almost all mechanical HDDs:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/944-6/disques-durs.html

Just make sure to keep back-ups of your most valuable files/data and keep your Windows 7/8/8.1/10 key somewhere

 

[moonbogg]

True RS. By the time it dies, well, lets be honest, it will never die. It will leave my hands in some way before it dies most likely. The only way to get writes on my drive is to install games. I'm already way behind my 40+ GB/day quota.

 

[arandomguy]

There is a lack of actual long term data though so I don't see why everyone makes this assumption.

The 840 EVO issue wasn't really made aware of until a large amount of time out in the wild and due to the popularity of the drive. The 840 non-EVO has the same issue but because of its relative lack of adoption was not mentioned.

The Techreport study in some ways does a disservice as it doesn't address the issue of the data retention.

The Hardware.fr return rates also aren't really long term. THey also show very low return rates for the 840 EVO, lower then the 850 EVO depending on size.

Despite the "promise" of 40nm 3D-NAND to have fixed things, I'm personally steering well clear of TLC drives from all brands. It's not as if Samsung's TLC EVO's are massively cheaper than Crucial's MLC drives, which is after all the only advantage TLC has (or is supposed to have...)

The 850 EVOs have come down a lot in price since launch. They also benchmark very well compared to others such as Crucial's MLC drives. They even bench higher than the 850 Pro in some categories. In that sense they are probably looked at as a go to product now but is there something here the benchmarks and how SSD reviews are done doesn't show?

I've been conversing with a technician at Ace Labs (the makers of PC3000) and they have found this too. Apparently, they setup 8 EVOs 4 months in advance for data recovery training and when training day came, 3 of 8 lost the root catalog and files were corrupted. 2 months later, they were up to 5 of the 8 being virtually unrecoverable.

If I understand correctly, these were new drives that all had about 40GB of data dumped to them for training purposes, then set aside for training day. I have one on my shelf that I am going to setup today for a test of my own.

However, the case I just finished seems to have confirmed this theory nicely and it certainly explains why these drives were having so many slow down issues before the firmware "fix" that Samsung released.

If any of you have one of these drives to spare, it might be worth your testing the drive too. Let's all copy data to these drives, I'm thinking of filling mine about 50%, then see what happens. If the theory stands, after sitting a month or two, there will be bad sectors in the used data sectors and none in the unused portion of sectors.

I'm curious if you've run into any similar findings with MLC drives? Particularly those that are now on much smaller lithography processes such as 16nm?

 

[rgallant]

I just finished a data recovery project from a 750GB EVO and have learned a lot about these drives in doing so.

The TLC NAND starts dropping bits within days or weeks of data being written to the sectors. So, after time, the drive starts to slow down when having to rely heavily on ECC to read those sectors. Given enough time a few months, those sectors become unrecoverable.

But, there is good news, they introduced a firmware fix that appears to force the drive to continuously re-write data back to the drive in order to avoid dropping the bits. However, it is a different story if the drive is powered off for any length of time.

The drive I received has been to several data recovery labs over the past few months who said that recovery was not possible. We, on the other hand, have been able to get by the broken firmware and clone the drive. Sadly, there is about 4% of the drive that is unreadable which caused 93% of the user's files to contain bad sectors. All unused sectors filled with zeros are 100% clean with no read errors.

My conclusions from this are:

1. These drives have virtually no shelf life, so don't archive data on them
2. If you have one that fails, get it to a data recovery lab that is capable of handling their recovery ASAP
3. Don't use these drives in mission critical systems
4. If using these drives, be sure to have the data backed up frequently

lol thats what I use for my back up drive. two 100gb + images a week.

but I think I did use the rewrite patch/firmware when it came out.

 

[FX2000]

When you get new computer/hard drive, you install everything you use. You don't continue that trend.