# Samsung 870 EVO - Beware, certain batches prone to failure!



## CiTay (Jan 31, 2022)

Certain 870 EVO 4TB and 2TB drives are affected by early failures where they develop uncorrectable errors and some data just cannot be read from them anymore.
This seems to primarily affect drives produced in January/February 2021. For example, i have three 870 EVO 4TB, only one is affected (so far), serial number S6BCNG0R207xxxx from February '21.

This is not an isolated issue, see 




__
		https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/p15wwq
That's just one example of such a thread, there's many more on different forums, just google for "870 evo failing" or the like.

Just today, i really started to notice the issue, some files just couldn't be properly read/copied off the drive, no matter what. Explorer aborts with a failure message, other tools the same.

On my affected drive, CrystalDiskmark reports Health 99%, Wear Leveling Count 5, around 12 TB written. Power on count is 273, "Reallocated Sector Count" is on 329, this last one  is already a bit worrying. But that's not the main thing. Each time a file cannot be read, "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate" keep rising by a couple dozen or even couple hundred!

I started a while ago with "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate" already at over 600, now i tried to copy my files to a HDD, and i'm at 2000 for each value and counting. Each time i try to read a damaged file, it rises. Some files i'm completely unable to copy, it just can't read a certain part of them from the SSD anymore. For some other files, the count seems to increase a little bit, but they still copy over, suggesting they are partly corrupted now. It's hard to give the total stats of how many percent of files are affected, but it's a serious issue already even if it's less than 10% of the files affected.

I saw one or two files failing to be read from this SSD before, but i thought, maybe they were corrupted in some way and didn't pay it much mind, since the SMART still didn't look too terrible. I know from other SSDs that there can be bad blocks even if they are new, so i didn't worry too much. But now this looks very different, i can't even copy some files anymore.

*Check your 870 EVO SSDs for these things:
Elevated "Reallocated Sector Count", "Used Reserve Block" and "Runtime Bad Block" count - first warning sign (my two other 870 EVOs have none).
Non-zero "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate", and especially if those two keep rising when you read/write files. Definitely affected then!*

You can read out the self-monitoring SMART values of your drives with CrystalDiskInfo.
In there under "Function" -> Advanced Feature -> Raw Values, select "10 [DEC]" to have human-readable values. You can then upload screenshots of the data, press CTRL-S to screenshot in there.


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## eidairaman1 (Jan 31, 2022)

Just rma the drive


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## CiTay (Jan 31, 2022)

Yep, i will. First i have to copy everything off it, as much as i can anyway. The data is not super important (i have backups of super important data), but it's still very annoying.

Especially since i spent extra to get 870 EVOs over, say, an MX500. The 870 EVO is one of the most expensive SATA drives for the consumer market, and then this...

Plus it's not just about me, there's the much bigger issue at hand here. By the looks of it, we have a large batch of 870 EVOs failing early, from Samsung, king of SSD reliability...


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## eidairaman1 (Jan 31, 2022)

CiTay said:


> Yep, i will. First i have to copy everything off it, as much as i can anyway. The data is not super important (i have backups of super important data), but it's still very annoying.
> 
> Especially since i spent extra to get 870 EVOs over, say, an MX500. The 870 EVO is one of the most expensive SATA drives for the consumer market, and then this...
> 
> Plus it's not just about me, there's the much bigger issue at hand here. By the looks of it, we have a large batch of 870 EVOs failing early, from Samsung, king of SSD reliability...


I go pros myself. But im glad you do what most dont, back up!


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## CiTay (Jan 31, 2022)

I have a 980 Pro 1TB as my boot drive. They don't come in 4TB, plus that would be a bit pricey. Not that the 870 EVO 4TBs could be called cheap.


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## Tetras (Feb 1, 2022)

CiTay said:


> *Check your 870 EVO SSDs for these things:
> Elevated "Reallocated Sector Count", "Used Reserve Block" and "Runtime Bad Block" count - first warning sign (my two other 870 EVOs have none).
> Non-zero "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate", and especially if those two keep rising when you read/write files. Definitely affected then!*
> 
> ...



Hmm, my drive has more power-on hours than yours but way less written and already 10 uncorrectable errors and it's using reserved blocks. Got it in March so nearly a year old, not sure when it was manufactured.

My other SSDs are showing no errors or reserved blocks used.


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## CiTay (Feb 1, 2022)

Tetras said:


> Hmm, my drive has more power-on hours than yours but way less written and already 10 uncorrectable errors and it's using reserved blocks. Got it in March so nearly a year old, not sure when it was manufactured.
> 
> My other SSDs are showing no errors or reserved blocks used.



Looks like the very early stages of one of these failures, yes. You wanna keep a close eye on the aforementioned values, and as soon as there's a file you can't copy/read anymore, backup all your data (in fact, you might wanna do that already) and RMA it. By the way, you could've used the integrated screenshot function (CTRL-S) and under "Function" there's also a setting to hide the serial number. Which i'd actually like to know (you can leave out the last four digits), cause it tells me roughly when this was produced. Looks like an early drive, exactly like most affected ones. The exact day it was produced is printed on the side of the packaging.


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## Tetras (Feb 1, 2022)

It's actually only an OS drive (ironically I chose the Samsung because I thought it would be the most reliable for this purpose  ), hence the low writes and probably the low read errors (since I don't really store much on the drive).

I found the box, it was manufactured in 2020-12-30. The firmware version: SVT01B6Q and serial number: S62BNJ0NC62.


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## CiTay (Feb 1, 2022)

Ok, it's one of the very first batches, they were only sold from 2021 on IIRC. So yeah, this one is highly suspicious.


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## Tetras (Feb 1, 2022)

CiTay said:


> Ok, it's one of the very first batches, they were only sold from 2021 on IIRC. So yeah, this one is highly suspicious.



Great, but thanks for the heads up. Maybe one of the hardware sites will pick this up and ask Samsung for an update. Would be nice to know if there's any way of heading it off or it's only RMA.


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## CiTay (Feb 1, 2022)

I would think the only solution is an RMA, because from the cases i've read about so far, Samsung are very quick to offer an RMA once you describe these characteristical symptoms.

I haven't actually tried to RMA mine, still busy with getting the files off there and then i'm gonna do a full scan with Samsung Magician etc., so i have more proof of the failure for the RMA.
Also, i kinda want to understand the issue more, especially since i have two more such drives.


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## Tetras (Feb 1, 2022)

CiTay said:


> I would think the only solution is an RMA, because from the cases i've read about so far, Samsung are very quick to offer an RMA once you describe these characteristical symptoms.
> 
> I haven't actually tried to RMA mine, still busy with getting the files off there and then i'm gonna do a full scan with Samsung Magician etc., so i have more proof of the failure for the RMA.
> Also, i kinda want to understand the issue more, especially since i have two more such drives.



So, I installed Magician. The smart scans didn't complete and both had the same error "Failing LBA". The images are the results of the full scan, smart data and Crystal Disk, after running all of magician's tests.


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## CiTay (Feb 1, 2022)

Yup there we have it, it's a full-blown failure. Get any important data off of it and RMA it.

I wonder how many ticking timebombs are out there. Most users don't know of this issue yet and the drives have only been sold for a year.

I also worry about my two other 870 EVOs. I don't know yet if only the early production dates are affected, or if this is a more widespread problem that only manifests after around half a year of use, but with almost all drives. Time will tell, i guess.

If it's more widespread, this will be a complete disaster not only for Samsung, but of course also for all the affected users if they don't have a backup. This problem will randomly corrupt some of the files and they can't be read anymore (at least using FreeFileSync, it will show a log afterwards of which files couldn't be copied). I think you're eventually gonna read everywhere about it if it's more widespread. Samsung's reputation for SSD reliability is on the line. I also worry about the replacement drive, on reddit i saw someone get (slightly) used drives as replacements from Samsung. Makes me want to write the vendor first and not Samsung, i don't want to get a used drive back. Also, even with a new drive, it's kinda hard to trust this model right now. Let's hope it really is just a problem of the early batches.


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## Tetras (Feb 1, 2022)

CiTay said:


> Yup there we have it, it's a full-blown failure. Get any important data off of it and RMA it.
> 
> I wonder how many ticking timebombs are out there. Most users don't know of this issue yet and the drives have only been sold for a year.
> 
> ...



I'm surprised it's not being talked about already, if it was a widespread issue with the flash I'd think all Samsung drives using this flash would be failing (980 and 980 Pro are 128L iirc), which suggests it is a limited batch, or an issue with the controller? I noticed some people seemed to resolve the issue by formatting the drive and updating the firmware, but I wonder if they're just hiding it because a drive with no data doesn't produce errors when reading data.


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## CiTay (Feb 1, 2022)

Yes, i've read about that "trick" too (zero-filling the drive and suddenly the error count doesn't increase anymore when you do a full scan). It might be that the drive controller knows that it's just zeroes in the cells and doesn't bother to actually read them, or something to that effect. I wouldn't trust this method at all. The only thing that counts is what the drive does with the data that's on there, and evidently, not all files can be read out successfully anymore. I also have the newest firmware on my 870 EVOs.

To me, once this problem appears, the drive is dead to me and i will RMA it, there is no other way. Unless Samsung want to acknowledge the problem and deliver an official fix with a new firmware update. But i think that is still some way off, first they will silently replace the affected drives and hope it doesn't make the rounds on the big tech websites.

More reading material: https://blog.yuo.be/2021/12/23/the-ten-month-old-ssd-that-ate-my-data/


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## stinger608 (Feb 5, 2022)

Holy crap, I may have to check my 980 pro. It's almost new and it was showing 97% last week. I've firing up that system today and I'm going to check.


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## CiTay (Feb 5, 2022)

I have no evidence of the 980 Pro being affected (and i also use one, from 2021-03). Plus it would be difficult to find out on the 980 Pro, unless you're already getting read errors in normal operation. Because the 980 Pro has a completely different set of SMART values, it doesn't report "Uncorrectable Error Count" or "ECC Error Rate", the main early warning signals for this failure. The health percentage, on the other hand, is not a good indicator for this failure. My affected 870 EVO still reports 99% health, despite multiple files having been unable to read from it, 329 reallocated sectors, and almost 5000 Uncorrectable Errors.

So instead of looking at the health percentage (which relies mostly on a conservative estimate from the manufacurer how many times the cells can be overwritten, i.e. the TBW value, and the real endurance is often 10x higher), i would suggest a full drive scan for bad sectors with Samsung Magician. This will make sure all cells can be properly read out. If that's the case, then there's no need to worry.


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## BSim500 (Feb 5, 2022)

Is this just an 870 thing or are the 970 EVO / 970 EVO Plus's affected too?


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## CiTay (Feb 5, 2022)

I would say more of a 870-EVO-only thing, since it uses the more modern NAND flash that is also used on the 980 Pro. The 970s are on a bit older NAND, plus they've also been around for much longer. So if there was a similar problem with them, you would've definitely heard about it already.


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## R-T-B (Feb 5, 2022)

Tetras said:


> Hmm, my drive has more power-on hours than yours but way less written and already 10 uncorrectable errors and it's using reserved blocks. Got it in March so nearly a year old, not sure when it was manufactured.
> 
> My other SSDs are showing no errors or reserved blocks used.
> 
> View attachment 234812


oof.  SSDs should not be showing uncorrectable errors until late in their life stages...  thats not a good sign.


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## Lifeless222 (Feb 15, 2022)

My 870 evo 1tb died...


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## eidairaman1 (Feb 15, 2022)

Lifeless222 said:


> My 870 evo 1tb died...


Rma it


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## RJARRRPCGP (Feb 16, 2022)

This reminds me of Maxtor Diamond Max 8 HDDs, (the slim models, the ones that look skinnier than the usual 3.5-inch sizing) which are failure prone. (The ones that are mainly model code 6Exxxxx)

While Diamond Max 9, IIRC, before Seagate bought Maxtor, were reliable. (ones with model code 6Yxxxxx were solid, OTOH)


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## chrcoluk (Mar 2, 2022)

I am cursed, the drive I brought to replace the dodgy MX500 in my laptop? You guessed it, is a 870 EVO.

Why did the guy on reddit delete himself after posting this though?


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## CiTay (Mar 2, 2022)

Hmm, you're right, he did. Weird. But i don't think it has anything to do with this 870 EVO issue.

About that, it's enough to keep a close eye on your Samsung (and make backups of your data), no need to replace it out of panic or anything. It seems that primarily (or only?) drives from a certain batch are affected, early in the production. If you have a more recent drive, they are probably ok. I mean, i have three (yes three) 870 EVO 4TB, and only the drive with an early production date gives me problems, i will RMA it eventually. The other two drives are completely normal, no read errors and SMART data looks good.


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## P4-630 (Mar 2, 2022)

My 870 Evo 500GB, used as external backup.


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## CiTay (Mar 2, 2022)

Like i wrote, under "Function" -> Advanced Feature -> Raw Values, select "10 [DEC]" to have human-readable values. You can then upload screenshots of the data, press CTRL-S to screenshot in there.

But i already see even in hexadecimal that the important values for this issue are all 0, so you'e not affected. Plus the SSD seems almost brand new. What's the date printed on the SSD or the packaging?


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## P4-630 (Mar 2, 2022)

CiTay said:


> What's the date printed on the SSD or the packaging?



2021-11-18 made in Thailand.


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## CiTay (Mar 2, 2022)

Yeah that's way newer than the failing ones are usually from. I don't think you will have problems with this one. But definitely keep an eye on the SMART values, i'd check every couple weeks or so.
There are four values which are important, i named them in the first post.


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## RJARRRPCGP (Mar 3, 2022)

CiTay said:


> randomly corrupt some of the files


That is what's most likely to occur with faulty SSDs. The bad-sectors report by Magician on post #12, is what usually happens with platter drives, albeit unless super bad, usually will be some sectors beyond 50 percent of the drive or closer to the half-point, versus the beginning.

Mea culpa=I can't tell if the bad sectors are at the beginning or not. (with the Magician block display)


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## chrcoluk (Mar 3, 2022)

mine is manufactured june 2021


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## Tarte (Mar 3, 2022)

I use it as an external backup, formally internal for data.


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## CiTay (Mar 3, 2022)

Tarte said:


> I use it as an external backup, formally internal for data.



That one is for sure affected, RMA it. Meets both criteria:

*Elevated "Reallocated Sector Count", "Used Reserve Block" and "Runtime Bad Block" count
Non-zero "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate", and especially if those two keep rising when you read/write files*

What date was it made?


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## Tarte (Mar 3, 2022)

Made date is 02.2021.
I will RMA it.
Thank you!


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## ThrashZone (Mar 3, 2022)

Hi,
Thankfully I haven't gone past 860 versions yet but at 99% but only at 500gb data
Even my old 850's look good at 99% 256gb os


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## CiTay (Mar 3, 2022)

Again, under "Function" -> Advanced Feature -> Raw Values, select "10 [DEC]" to have human-readable values. I don't know why it doesn't default to that, the hexadecimal values are harder to read (except 0).

Health status means absolutely nothing for this particular problem. Health status percentage relies mostly on a conservative estimate from the manufacurer about how many times the cells can be overwritten (i.e. the TBW value), and the real endurance is often 10x higher. It makes sense that the TBW is a conservative value, this way the manufacturer can decline RMA if you have used the SSD excessively and are above the TBW value. This way, when you use an SSD professionally in a server environment, you would get a server-grade SSD instead. And that's not just pure marketing, the best NAND flash is always used in server-grade SSDs.


Anyway, for this problem, the only thing you have to look for in the SMART values is:

*"Reallocated Sector Count" & "Used Reserve Block" & "Runtime Bad Block" going above 0
and
"Uncorrectable Error Count" & "ECC Error Rate" high/increasing*

The "and" is also important. A couple reallocated sectors are not the end of the world when no data is affected. Like the name says, the affected blocks get reallocated/remapped with reserve blocks, and will be avoided for saving any data in the future. But when you have uncorrectable errors / ECC errors, it means that data is affected. Some blocks that already had data in them have gone bad, and thus some file cannot be read anymore, because once the SSD tries to read those blocks where part of the file is saved, it aborts, and the Error count is increased. That's when you know you need to RMA, this should not happen with an SSD.


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## ThrashZone (Mar 3, 2022)

Hi,
Missed where you used samsung magician and what it said about the ssd's


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## PhilR (Mar 10, 2022)

Have already 3 failed 2 TB EVOs with serials S62* - didn't check production date yet. All failed at around 13-14 TB written, pops up with read error and smart reallocation warning.
They were in production for less than a year. Samsung's tool says they are GOOD.


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## P4-630 (Mar 10, 2022)

PhilR said:


> Have already 3 failed 2 TB EVOs with serials S62* - didn't check production date yet. All failed at around 13-14 TB written, pops up with read error and smart reallocation warning.
> They were in production for less than a year. Samsung's tool says they are GOOD.



They were still under warranty, so I assume you got new ones from Samsung and they are OK?


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## Powernoob (Mar 22, 2022)

Today I realized that my Samsung 870 EVO is super slow and the task manager said it was used 100 % all the time. At first I thought it's a Windows search thing but then I saw in the windows logs that it complained about bad sectors on the drive - MANY bad sectors.
Crystal DiskInfo provided this and I wanted to share it with you guys since your replies in this forum where very helpful. Thanks by the way!





Its almost unusable now. I try to rescue some more important files, but the speed (to another SSD) fluctuates between 9 MByte/s and 0....


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## Tetras (Mar 22, 2022)

Powernoob said:


> Today I realized that my Samsung 870 EVO is super slow and the task manager said it was used 100 % all the time. At first I thought it's a Windows search thing but then I saw in the windows logs that it complained about bad sectors on the drive - MANY bad sectors.
> Crystal DiskInfo provided this and I wanted to share it with you guys since your replies in this forum where very helpful. Thanks by the way!
> 
> Its almost unusable now. I try to rescue some more important files, but the speed (to another SSD) fluctuates between 9 MByte/s and 0....



Wow, only 3000GB written, they usually seem to die 10000+


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## Icon Charlie (Mar 22, 2022)

When the 870 came out I looked at their construction. I went and bought the 6, 860 EVO instead.  IMHO Samsung went cheap on the 870. I did not like how the 870 was put together.  It takes a little bit of research now these days because you can not just buy on name brand only. 

Every corporation is cutting corners these days.  Samsung is no exception.


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## CiTay (Mar 22, 2022)

Powernoob said:


> Crystal DiskInfo provided this and I wanted to share it with you guys since your replies in this forum where very helpful. Thanks by the way!



Yeah, there's an ungodly amount of ECC errors, while there aren't even that many bad blocks (at least in relation). What this tells me is that the bad sectors affect some important or commonly read files, perhaps even a folder structure instead of a file, or that you have repeatedly attempted to read out certain damaged files.

Let me tell you from my own attempts: There is no way you can successfully read out files anymore that contain bad blocks. The controller or Windows will only stall when you try to do that, and the ECC errors will increase. Those files are basically lost. They might still contain 99% valid data, but the damaged 1% will cause insurmountable trouble for the SSD and Windows.

Can you tell me the serial number of your drive (minus the last four digits) and/or what production date it is (should be on the SSD and the packaging)? I want to know if this is another of the early production drives.


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## Powernoob (Mar 24, 2022)

Sure - the serial number is S6BCNG0R21xxxxx and its production date 2/21.


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## R-T-B (Mar 24, 2022)

Icon Charlie said:


> When the 870 came out I looked at their construction. I went and bought the 6, 860 EVO instead.  IMHO Samsung went cheap on the 870. I did not like how the 870 was put together.  It takes a little bit of research now these days because you can not just buy on name brand only.
> 
> Every corporation is cutting corners these days.  Samsung is no exception.


Not sure what you can construe from "construction" when everything is down to NAND chip and controller these days...  and those all look the same construction wise.


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## CiTay (Mar 24, 2022)

Powernoob said:


> Sure - the serial number is S6BCNG0R21xxxxx and its production date 2/21.



Very similar to my affected one, which is a S6BCNG0R207xxxx from February '21. So it's another one from those early production batches.

There must be thousands of those early 870 EVOs around, silently developing bad sectors, which will only be discovered when some file can't be read out anymore someday...


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## Powernoob (Mar 24, 2022)

The odd thing: I'm not sure if I actually lost a file (my last full backup was 5 months ago, so there was not too much to sync). Maybe I was lucky(?) enough to realize from the extreme speed decrease that something is wrong before losing data. At least no important data seem to be lost.


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## CiTay (Mar 24, 2022)

Good. It's good to always make a backup of truly important data anyway. As we see, things can go wrong even with a top-shelf SSD. If you RMA it, it would be nice if you could write how that goes.


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## Powernoob (Mar 24, 2022)

I already contacted Samsung. They wanted some information and screenshots of Magician's diagnose, smart and drive details page. Also they required me to send photos of the drive (top, bottom, interface) and a copy of the receipt as proof of purchase. After that I got a link where I had to fill in some of the infos again. Now I wait for the RMA-labes to be sent to me and the parcel service to contact me.
We'll see...


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## thatoneguy111 (Mar 27, 2022)

I'll add my points.

Two 870 EVO 1TB, one with significant Uncorrectables and the other some. Just over 1 year old, SN in the S5Y2NJ0NC0xxxxx range

Model NameSamsung SSD 870 EVO 1TB


IDDescriptionThresholdCurrent ValueWorst ValueRaw Data5​Reallocated Sector Count10​85​85​164​OK9​Power-on Hours0​98​98​9104​OK12​Power-on Count0​99​99​203​OK177​Wear Leveling Count0​98​98​41​OK179​Used Reserved Block Count (total)10​85​85​164​OK181​Program Fail Count (total)10​100​100​0​OK182​Erase Fail Count (total)10​100​100​0​OK183​Runtime Bad Count (total)10​85​85​164​OK187​Uncorrectable Error Count0​99​99​5439​CRITICAL190​Airflow Temperature0​70​54​30​OK195​ECC Error Rate0​199​199​5439​CRITICAL199​CRC Error Count0​100​100​0​OK235​POR Recovery Count0​99​99​189​OK241​Total LBAs Written0​99​99​76905203513​OK


Model NameSamsung SSD 870 EVO 1TB
 

IDDescriptionThresholdCurrent ValueWorst ValueRaw Data5​Reallocated Sector Count10​99​99​9​OK9​Power-on Hours0​98​98​9118​OK12​Power-on Count0​99​99​205​OK177​Wear Leveling Count0​98​98​40​OK179​Used Reserved Block Count (total)10​99​99​9​OK181​Program Fail Count (total)10​100​100​0​OK182​Erase Fail Count (total)10​100​100​0​OK183​Runtime Bad Count (total)10​99​99​9​OK187​Uncorrectable Error Count0​99​99​180​CRITICAL190​Airflow Temperature0​70​48​30​OK195​ECC Error Rate0​199​199​180​CRITICAL199​CRC Error Count0​100​100​0​OK235​POR Recovery Count0​99​99​126​OK241​Total LBAs Written0​99​99​7.6E+10​OK


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## Icon Charlie (Mar 27, 2022)

R-T-B said:


> Not sure what you can construe from "construction" when everything is down to NAND chip and controller these days...  and those all look the same construction wise.


True.  The difference was enough to bother me.


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## chrcoluk (Mar 31, 2022)

So I have this in my laptop now.

There is a firmware update available, I googled it because as usual no changelog, and apparently this is only offered to some variants of the 870 evo, the guy who posted it says there is a newer controller chip now that isnt phoenix (are samsung now in the bait and switch game?).  Anyone else heard of this?

On my SSD for reference all smart self tests passed including the extended test.  Hopefully this wont have crazy erase cycles like the mx500 had.

If people want pics of label for sku, I can post as I took before putting in laptop.


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## CiTay (Mar 31, 2022)

I have three 870 EVOs from different production dates, all have the same firmware, and the oldest one is affected by the problem from this thread.

Samsung will never use someone else's controller, they have a focus on vertical integration with their own controllers and their own NAND, this keeps costs down and gives them a competetive advantage. So unlike ADATA, Kingston etc., they won't just swap parts to cheaper ones without notice.

About passing tests, this is for when you want to do the RMA. First, you keep looking in CrystalDiskInfo for the signs i mentioned in the first post. This is the only indication you need to see if the problem appears or not. And depending on the production date, there is a certain higher (early dates) or lower (later dates) probability for it. So the only thing that would be interesting from the label is the production date.


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## OneMoar (Mar 31, 2022)

you put a QLC drive in a NAS and then wonder why it failed?
sigh I can't I just can't with you people


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## CiTay (Mar 31, 2022)

OneMoar said:


> you put a QLC drive in a NAS and then wonder why it failed?
> sigh I can't I just can't with you people



870 EVO is TLC NAND. You're probably thinking of 870 QVO. Plus, who did you see mentioning a NAS?

My three EVOs are normal internal SSDs.






(Yes, i enabled XMP later, this was right after a BIOS update.)


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## chrcoluk (Mar 31, 2022)

CiTay said:


> I have three 870 EVOs from different production dates, all have the same firmware, and the oldest one is affected by the problem from this thread.
> 
> Samsung will never use someone else's controller, they have a focus on vertical integration with their own controllers and their own NAND, this keeps costs down and gives them a competetive advantage. So unlike ADATA, Kingston etc., they won't just swap parts to cheaper ones without notice.
> 
> About passing tests, this is for when you want to do the RMA. First, you keep looking in CrystalDiskInfo for the signs i mentioned in the first post. This is the only indication you need to see if the problem appears or not. And depending on the production date, there is a certain higher (early dates) or lower (later dates) probability for it. So the only thing that would be interesting from the label is the production date.


Is it either of these firmware's 'SVT01B6Q' or 'SVT02B6Q'?  If its SVT01B6Q can you check if magician offers an upgrade?


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## CiTay (Mar 31, 2022)

All on SVT02B6Q, no updates available.


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## chrcoluk (Mar 31, 2022)

Found a tweet which references this thread and the reddit link, mentions the new firmware.


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1502185863052152833
Attaching my label, its not quite as old as your drives, but not that much newer either.  Like most SSD's I purchase its much older than the date I actually purchased it.


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## CiTay (Mar 31, 2022)

Well yeah, i updated them all to SVT02B6Q at one point, but i'm not certain what the previous firmware version was, and once you get these errors, SVT02B6Q does nothing to fix them.
So if anything, maybe SVT02B6Q is meant to prevent this problem somehow, but i don't know if that is possible for the early production batches.
About "silently" releasing a firmware update, that's their normal modus operandi. Just today i happened to find a new firmware for my 980 PRO because i installed the new Magician 7.1.0.

2021-06 should be good. You don't really have to cover your serial number like that, you can remove the last four digits if you want, but the serial is a good way to pinpoint the more exact production date.
Also, the serial number could still be decoded from the barcode, but i don't know what even a black hat could do with any serial number. I'm sure i posted screenshots with a drive serial before. No big deal


----------



## chrcoluk (Apr 1, 2022)

Sept 2021 manufactured also bad drives.  I got mine from Amazon but obviously well past their no frills return policy now.  Going to do a badblocks scan on it and see what happens.  The 860 EVO's it seems were better.

If the new firmware prevents it from kicking off (I also have same suspicion) I wonder if it does it the horrible way of forcing data refresh which of course accelerates erase cycles, a hacky way of fixing dud hardware.  I wanted to see first how long a erase cycle takes on the shipped firmware, then flash and see if its accelerated, of course one can not downgrade flash, so flashing is a full on commitment in that new firmware version.

What I also found interesting is the reports some people got refunds without even been offered a replacement, is that samsung having no faith in a replacement 870 EVO working for their workload or perhaps just lack of stock?  I have never heard of a company offering refunds like that before on manufacturer RMA's.


__
		https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/og701s/_/hz002k0

Hmm Interesting.  https://blog.yuo.be/2021/12/23/the-ten-month-old-ssd-that-ate-my-data/

Near the bottom, a new SMART attribute gets added on the new firmware, says vendor specific.



> (If you’re particularly observant, you’d have noticed there’s a new SMART attribute at the bottom in the previous screenshot. *It appeared after applying the recently released SVT02B6Q firmware update for the drive*. I don’t know what the attribute is and neither does the Magician, it seems. I also have no idea what the firmware update does as Samsung haven’t provided any release notes. The update certainly didn’t help with my problems, but it was probably too late for it to anyway.)



So March 2021, January 2021 (made in korea), Sept 2021 confirmed bad manufacturing dates,

-- Ran the full scan in magician which is pretty much the same as a read only badblocks scan, and no issues, will carry on using it on shipped firmware and just keep an eye on it.


----------



## Tetras (Apr 6, 2022)

OneMoar said:


> you put a QLC drive in a NAS and then wonder why it failed?
> sigh I can't I just can't with you people



They're not QLC (that's the QVO) and it has nothing to do with NAS usage, mine is a desktop drive with barely 3 TB written. Drives manufactured between the above dates seem to be consistently failing.



chrcoluk said:


> Sept 2021 manufactured also bad drives.  I got mine from Amazon but obviously well past their no frills return policy now.  Going to do a badblocks scan on it and see what happens.  The 860 EVO's it seems were better.



Hmm, that's worrying if September drives are failing because it suggests 1: it isn't isolated to early batches, 2: Samsung didn't identify and fix the issue.

About the controller, I think that was about the 970 Evo? If I recall correctly, they swapped the phoenix controller of the 970 Evo to Elpis from the 980 Pro.


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## Captain Danger (Apr 8, 2022)

So I was looking for changelog for firmware version *"SVT02B6Q"* and it lead me to the reddit post/this thread.

I have *870 EVO 1 TB*.
Made in *Korea*.
Production Date : *2021-01-15*
Purchased On :* 2022-01-19*
Stock/Shipped Firmware Version : *SVT01B6Q*

I have been using it for over 2.5 months now (on shipped firmware, updated the firmware only yesterday) and I think everything looks fine so far - only health dropped by 1%. Can someone please confirm from the attached CrystalDiskInfo screenshot?

I ran a full Diagnostic Scan through Samsung Magician just to be sure as well - screenshot attached. It said it will take 40 minutes for 1 TB SSD but it took 2 hours, I am not sure if that is of any concern?

I am currently running it in Full Performance mode under Samsung Magician.

Attaching the CrystalDiskMark screenshot as well, are those Read/Write values normal when it is set to Full Performance Mode under Samsung Magician? 

From the above reply my SSD falls in the bad manufacturing category so I will keep updating here if anything shows up.


----------



## Tetras (Apr 9, 2022)

Captain Danger said:


> So I was looking for changelog for firmware version *"SVT02B6Q"* and it lead me to the reddit post/this thread.
> 
> I have *870 EVO 1 TB*.
> Made in *Korea*.
> ...



Seems like you're good for now, you have zero reserved blocks used or unrecoverable errors


----------



## CiTay (Apr 9, 2022)

Captain Danger said:


> Attaching the CrystalDiskMark screenshot as well, are those Read/Write values normal when it is set to Full Performance Mode under Samsung Magician?



1) Your SSD is completely fine so far. "Health" dropping relatively quickly to 99% is normal. For the drop to 98% it will take considerably longer. You probably have to use this SSD for several decades to see it drop to concerning levels. By then, SATA technology will be something that some old people may remember.

2) There are certainly some snake-oil shenanigans going on with full performance mode. It seems to cache things through your RAM. I would use Standard more, or Custom mode with at least the "Full Power Mode" disabled. This aversion against power-saving modes (or the notion that they hinder performance) is completely unjustified. Whenever there is something to do, the SSD will wake up within nano- or milliseconds and stay awake until the transfers are done. It's unnecessary for it then to stay on high alert, because 99% of the time there is simply nothing to do. It's like grandma leaving her car running day and night, for the one time in the week she wants to go grocery shopping, so it saves her the two seconds where she would have to turn the key in the ignition.


----------



## ThrashZone (Apr 9, 2022)

Hi,
Issue is mainly with 2 & 4tb models not 1tb models.


----------



## Tetras (Apr 9, 2022)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> Issue is mainly with 2 & 4tb models not 1tb models.


That's what I thought, but my 0.5tb is included


----------



## ThrashZone (Apr 9, 2022)

Tetras said:


> That's what I thought, but my 0.5tb is included


Hi,
I don't have any 870's fortunately but damn they really screwed the pooch on this series.


----------



## iddqd (Apr 11, 2022)

I just started RMA the second time for my 4TB 870 Evo.
I bought it in February 2021 and noticed problems after a few months. The SSD was produced 2021-01-16. Last summer I contacted Samsung and after some back and forth because i am using linux (no samsung magician) they accepted the RMA. I had to put the ssd in a windows pc and format it to make the necessary tests with their software. The formatting resolved the read errors and Samsung at first declined the RMA, but the SMART data was still there and it showed the bad values so they eventually gave in.

The replacement SSD was produced on 2021-01-15, so one day before my original one. I noticed errors again after after a few months but I had no motivation to transplant the ssd and perform all the tests. I normally back everything on the SSD up to a spinning disk raid array but my backup script didn't work for a few weeks without me noticing and now I lost some data (luckily nothing I cannot get back).

Samsung updated Magician and now I can perform the necessary tests without formatting. As I am writing the full diagnostic scan is ongoing and there are lots of red squares (errors). So there should be no problem with starting the RMA process this time. Oddly enough, with the new version of magician and without formatting I can only perform the tests which were not possible before and vice versa.

Here is a screenhot of the full scan, after more than 4 hours of the estimated 2,5 hours (160 minutes for 4 TB). It is already 14% finished 




CrystalDiskInfo, before the full diagnostic scan started:




CrystalDiskInfo now (during the scan and with decimal raw values).




What will happen if the threshold is reached during the diagnostic scan? Before starting the scan it was at 45 an now it is at 35 with only about 15% done.


----------



## CiTay (Apr 11, 2022)

iddqd said:


> CrystalDiskInfo now (during the scan and with decimal raw values).



Ouch. Yeah, Reallocated Sectors will increase during a scan, but Uncorrectable/ECC Errors will even increase way more, because the SSD keeps retrying to read the data, each time failing error checking and stalling the drive for a while. With this sort of SMART data, you will have no problem getting the RMA.




iddqd said:


> What will happen if the threshold is reached during the diagnostic scan? Before starting the scan it was at 45 an now it is at 35 with only about 15% done.



Nothing specifically will happen, CrystalDiskInfo will perhaps mark that item with a red dot and the health status might even go to "Bad", but it could also stay on "Good". Shows you what a bad metric the Health Status is in there. If you don't know how to interpret the raw values (which should always be in DEC, i have no idea why HEX is default), then CrystalDiskInfo is not really the best tool for cases where you are unsure. But it shows everything conveniently at once, so if you know what to look for, it's quite good.


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## Captain Danger (Apr 12, 2022)

iddqd said:


> The replacement SSD was produced on 2021-01-15, so one day before my original one.


My 1 TB 870 EVO that I posted about above has the exact same date!  Is yours made in Korea as well?


----------



## iddqd (Apr 12, 2022)

Captain Danger said:


> My 1 TB 870 EVO that I posted about above has the exact same date!  Is yours made in Korea as well?


Yes, both of them are made in Korea. The S/N of the first one, which is manufactured one day after the replacement, is 51 higher than the replacement.

The full scan is still in progress, 42% after 16 hours and lots of errors. The SMART value for reallocated sectors is getting worse as it is scanning, but slower. It was at 45 (2440) before the scan, dropped quickly to 35 (2908) after about 4 hours and is now at 31 (3902) . So it does not appear to be a linear progression.
The value for uncorrectable errors started at 99 (3168) and dropped down to 65 (350894), just like @CiTay described). The raw values of uncorrectable erros and ECC error rate are the same, but the smart value of ECC error rate stayed at 199.


----------



## xorbe (Apr 12, 2022)

I bought a 4TB 870 EVO in Apr '21 ... guess I'll have to have a look, sigh.  Yup, manuf Jan 2021 ... well, shoot.  Mine is still looking good at 1,316H and 2,571GB written.  Copied my precious data off, just a bunch of non-precious multimedia left.  Though the log says one failed LBA after 800H.  Will full scan ...


----------



## 2BitNandBand (Apr 12, 2022)

I have 3 870 EVO's here:


1TB, JAN 2021, Korea (1 Reallocated Sector)
4TB, NOV 2021, Korea (Fine so far)
1TB, FEB 2022, Thailand (Fine so far)
The 1TB from Jan 2021 shows 1 reallocated sector, so I assume it's all downhill from here. I pulled it from my system and replaced it with the other 1TB. The new 1TB came with the later revision firmware. My 4TB still came with the older firmware, but I've since updated it. Really hoping I don't have any issues with that one.


----------



## ThrashZone (Apr 12, 2022)

Hi,
At what point does sammy start sending out 860 rma replacements ?


----------



## CiTay (Apr 12, 2022)

2BitNandBand said:


> The 1TB from Jan 2021 shows 1 reallocated sector, so I assume it's all downhill from here.



Just run a full scan in Samsung Magician, it should uncover any new bad sectors. The main problem is not the fact that there are bad sectors, because they can simply be reallocated from the unallocated blocks that are reserved for that very purpose. For example you can see that on Sandisk SSDs, i've had several where the value "A9" Bad Block Count was >1000 from factory (on a 2TB SSD), so every SSD will have bad blocks from factory. Sandisk also have the "05" Reassigned Block Count value, this should stay at 0 ideally. And Samsung just doesn't show the amount of factory bad blocks in the SMART data, so with Samsung SSDs you will only see newly discovered bad sectors in "05".

Anyway, the real problem is when reallocated sectors start increasing while you already use the SSD. Because if the data can't be read out anymore from those sectors, then the entire file is lost, simply because it can't be read in its entirety anymore. And this seems to happen silently. Meaning, unless you try to copy or read out all your files, you will never know that some of them might be partly saved on bad sectors. A full scan should do the same thing, so it should be able to uncover all those lingering bad sectors.

This is the concerning part with this flaw: A top-notch (technology-wise) SSD silently developing bad sectors, when the NAND flash really wasn't punished much yet with outrageous TBW.


----------



## 2BitNandBand (Apr 12, 2022)

CiTay said:


> Just run a full scan in Samsung Magician, it should uncover any new bad sectors.


Ah, Magician can't see the drive over USB, and that's the only way I have to connect it now that it's been replaced. But I know it said 0 when I initially got it, so it increased from 0 to 1. That's an infinity percent increase, which is a lot.


----------



## CiTay (Apr 12, 2022)

2BitNandBand said:


> That's an infinity percent increase, which is a lot.



Hehe, that's one way to look at it. I'm sure Samsung won't agree though when it comes to an RMA. You need a bit more than one bad sector for that.


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## xorbe (Apr 12, 2022)

xorbe said:


> I bought a 4TB 870 EVO in Apr '21 ... guess I'll have to have a look, sigh.  Yup, manuf Jan 2021 ... well, shoot.  Mine is still looking good at 1,316H and 2,571GB written.  Copied my precious data off, just a bunch of non-precious multimedia left.  Though the log says one failed LBA after 800H.  Will full scan ...



Yup I have a red square on the scan already, and the drive hasn't even been through 1 complete write cycle (2.5TB written on 4TB drive).  Not sure what drive to switch to.  It says 1 reallocation event, 5 ecc errors.  Is that marked for death, or is that a one-off failed cell.


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## iddqd (Apr 12, 2022)

Full diagnostic scan has finally finished. It took more than 28 hours (after 24 hours the time resets to 0, the programmers probably didn't anticipate it taking that long )
The red text at the bottom reads "Magician has found an error on the drive. A recovery is recommended." I followed their advice and let it do the recovery. It took a few minutes and now all the errors are gone. Problem solved 
I won't trust it with any data anymore. Samsung already sent me a link to the RMA-form that I filled out. Now I am waiting for the shipping label. I hope the third time will be the charme and it works.


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## chrcoluk (Apr 13, 2022)

@iddqd not english, but I assume you was doing the full LBA test which is basically the same as a read only badblocks run.  I would for sure RMA that, dont trust a drive that cant pass that assuming its nothing to do with cabling, DMI signal integrity etc.

Basically external problems that cause errors would increase the SMART CRC value (C7 in this case), so if only that changes it can be caused by something external to the drive, but the easy way to test if this is the cause is swap with another SSD, usually cabling or or external signal integrity issues will affect everything, so would be easy to know.  e.g. back when I had a too high system agent voltage, every SSD I put in this PC that didnt have modern error correction would error like crazy simply from running chkdsk.

I am guessing this is an actual problem with your SSD though given the rep the 870 EVO now has, luckily for me mine so far is still ok, and has also fixed a problem I had with my MX500 (with the MX 500 in my laptop would freeze when screen off on battery power, it was devsleep crashing the MX 500 I think).

I also so far have no erase cycles, a very refreshing change from the MX 500 behaviour.  Sadly though I expect I will be posting in this thread in a few months with the same problems as you guys.  So making sure my backups keep rolling.


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## Yraggul666 (Apr 13, 2022)

Oh sure, just my EFFFing luck, just ordered a 870 2TB yesterday evening. Hasn't arrived yet.
That's what i get for not sticking with WD or Crucial, only ordered it because WD/Crucial weren't in stock at the time and i'm in a hurry.
I'll try to change the order to anything else.
Fucking sammy......


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## tabascosauz (Apr 13, 2022)

Yraggul666 said:


> Oh sure, just my EFFFing luck, just ordered a 870 2TB yesterday evening. Hasn't arrived yet.
> That's what i get for not sticking with WD or Crucial, only ordered it because WD/Crucial weren't in stock at the time and i'm in a hurry.
> I'll try to change the order to anything else.
> Fucking sammy......



I mean......as long as you buy from a big retailer, what are the odds you'll get a problem drive manufactured back in Q1 2021...in Q2 2022?


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## puma99dk| (Apr 13, 2022)

My 850 EVO is still rocking and kicking without a bleep


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## Yraggul666 (Apr 13, 2022)

tabascosauz said:


> I mean......as long as you buy from a big retailer, what are the odds you'll get a problem drive manufactured back in Q1 2021...in Q2 2022?


I know, you'd think the odds would be slim to none, but i know myself, i'm that guy ordering a pint and the barrel is empty, i have to wait for the barrel to be replaced with a full one......


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## 2BitNandBand (Apr 13, 2022)

CiTay said:


> Hehe, that's one way to look at it. I'm sure Samsung won't agree though when it comes to an RMA. You need a bit more than one bad sector for that.



I submitted an RMA request and just told them "reallocated sectors > 0" was the issue. They approved it. Maybe because they know it came from that problem batch? I have a number of Samsung SSD's aside from just the 870 models, and none of them have showed reallocated sectors > 0, so it was pretty concerning to me, especially since it was manufactured in that Q1 2021 window. I didn't trust it for continued use.


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## CiTay (Apr 13, 2022)

iddqd said:


> Full diagnostic scan has finally finished. It took more than 28 hours (after 24 hours the time resets to 0, the programmers probably didn't anticipate it taking that long )
> The red text at the bottom reads "Magician has found an error on the drive. A recovery is recommended." I followed their advice and let it do the recovery. It took a few minutes and now all the errors are gone. Problem solved
> I won't trust it with any data anymore. Samsung already sent me a link to the RMA-form that I filled out. Now I am waiting for the shipping label. I hope the third time will be the charme and it works.



I'm actually German, so i can read it fine, but yes, we want to keep things in English on an English forum, obviously. That is an epic amount of ECC errors now, but it was to be expected. And what's taking so long is the drive retrying and stalling for seconds on each sector it can't read. The SSD basically tried more than half a million times to read the sectors, unsuccessfully!


----------



## xorbe (Apr 14, 2022)

The data is protected by ECC, which means chunks are failing fast enough to even render the ECC correction useless, only detection.


----------



## Pwnstix (Apr 14, 2022)

I just came across this thread after I had just happened to take a look through my Samsung Magician status. Freaked out and found this thread.

Full info:
-Samsung 870 EVO 4TB
-Made in Korea
-Product Date: 2021 03 03
-S/N: S6BBNG0R30xxxx   (and CrystalDiskInfo also shows a D at the end of what are the last four digits as shown on the package.
-Firmware: SVT02B6Q and there are no further updates, also latest version of Magician
-Bought March 27, 2021 and installed and in used since early April, 2021.
-Use: Internal SSD. I have some personal stuff on it that I do back up, and the rest is currently being used as game storage.

I have not yet run a full diagnostic scan on the drive. 

I have this registered on Samsung's support site, but it was difficult for me to double check that I did have it registered, because it didn't initially come up in my list of registered products...I had to find a different way to get to it through Google, so I could get to the actual support page. Seems kind of confusing.


Here's my screenshots from Magician and CrystalDiskInfo.


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## CiTay (Apr 14, 2022)

Pwnstix said:


> Here's my screenshots from Magician and CrystalDiskInfo.



Yes, another case of this problem. I would RMA it. Please keep us informed about the RMA process, like what they want you to do to prove it's RMA-worthy etc.
They are probably gonna make you do a full scan with Magician, for example.


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## PhilR (Apr 14, 2022)

Just FYI, we've tried RMAing multiple drives here in Europe, it's a joke. The disks started failing, we pulled them out of the server, stuck them on a desktop machine, ran Magician *before* and *after* the firmware upgrade. SMART does say there are errors, but the full test from Samsung M. just shows all green. Which means they won't take disks for RMA...

Here's the list of things they ask you to provide *for each disk*:


  • A brief description of the problem you have with your drive.
  •  Please provide us with screenshots of any error messages or error codes.
  • Please provide us with a short video clip showing the problem you are
    experiencing with your drive and any troubleshooting steps you may have
    performed, if possible.
  • A screenshot of the Samsung Magician Drive Details page
  • A screenshot of the results of the Diagnostic Scan (Please note that the
    Diagnostic Scan is only possible on the following models: 860 PRO, 860/870
    EVO, 860/870 QVO, 970 EVO PLUS, 980 PRO, 980).
  • The SMART test result from the Samsung Magician.
    Samsung Magician can be downloaded via the following link: https://
www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/
    Please note that the software is only compatible with Windows and the SSD
    must be connected directly to the motherboard.
    To obtain the SMART result, simply click on the 'SMART' button located at
    the top-right corner of the Samsung Magician Drive Dashboard page.
  • A copy of your proof of purchase*
  • What is your country of residence?*
  • Where was the SSD being used? Server, Nas, Desktop PC, etc?
  • Are you an end-user or re-seller of this drive?*
  • Photos of the front and backside of the entire SSD clearly indicating the
    serial number on the label on the drive.**
  • A close-up photo of the connector of the SSD.**

We have 20+ drives in production, but you can clearly tell they're not going to help out.


----------



## Tetras (Apr 14, 2022)

PhilR said:


> Just FYI, we've tried RMAing multiple drives here in Europe, it's a joke. The disks started failing, we pulled them out of the server, stuck them on a desktop machine, ran Magician *before* and *after* the firmware upgrade. SMART does say there are errors, but the full test from Samsung M. just shows all green. Which means they won't take disks for RMA...
> 
> Here's the list of things they ask you to provide *for each disk*:



Mine doesn't pass any of the diagnostics tests, so I'm surprised that yours do, how many TB have they written? By the time they get to 10TB, I'd be surprised if the scans still pass.


----------



## iddqd (Apr 14, 2022)

PhilR said:


> SMART does say there are errors, but the full test from Samsung M. just shows all green.


When I RMA'd the first drive last year I had the same results. I formatted the disk because there was a linux filesystem on it and for some tests Magician needs a Windows-compatible filesystem.
This time I ran the tests without touching the filesystem and it found lots of errors (see post #79).
But I started the RMA process before the full scan finished and submitted only the SMART data. Without any more questions the sent me the unique link to the RMA form. Now I am waiting for the shipping label which should have already arived (the say within 48 hours).


----------



## Tetras (Apr 14, 2022)

iddqd said:


> When I RMA'd the first drive last year I had the same results. I formatted the disk because there was a linux filesystem on it and for some tests Magician needs a Windows-compatible filesystem.
> This time I ran the tests without touching the filesystem and it found lots of errors (see post #79).
> But I started the RMA process before the full scan finished and submitted only the SMART data. Without any more questions the sent me the unique link to the RMA form. Now I am waiting for the shipping label which should have already arived (the say within 48 hours).



As far as I know, formatting the drives scrubs the errors on a full scan, even on Windows.


----------



## Pwnstix (Apr 14, 2022)

I ran into some problems trying to access Samsung's support site...apparently, I'd had my products registered on either the Singapore or India side of the site, and I am in the US. I wondered why my registered products continued to not show up, and I guess that's why... But I don't remember registering them on the non-US site... I could swear I did everything correctly. 

Anyway, I just made sure I'm logged into the US support site and I re-registered them and re-submitted my proofs of purchase. I guess they'll get back to me on that...and hopefully they do, because my option to 'Request Service' is currently greyed out while I wait for them to approve those. I may be SoL here if they decide I've registered them outside of a certain time window, even though I had already registered them (most importantly, my 860 EVO 4TB drive) last year, just...on the wrong country site, or something...


----------



## 2BitNandBand (Apr 14, 2022)

Pwnstix said:


> I ran into some problems trying to access Samsung's support site...apparently, I'd had my products registered on either the Singapore or India side of the site, and I am in the US. I wondered why my registered products continued to not show up, and I guess that's why... But I don't remember registering them on the non-US site... I could swear I did everything correctly.
> 
> Anyway, I just made sure I'm logged into the US support site and I re-registered them and re-submitted my proofs of purchase. I guess they'll get back to me on that...and hopefully they do, because my option to 'Request Service' is currently greyed out while I wait for them to approve those. I may be SoL here if they decide I've registered them outside of a certain time window, even though I had already registered them (most importantly, my 860 EVO 4TB drive) last year, just...on the wrong country site, or something...


Going through samsung.com is a pain. Email the memory product email address here and tell them you want an RMA.


----------



## Captain Danger (Apr 14, 2022)

Can someone confirm if registering the product on their website is a requirement for RMA?


----------



## iddqd (Apr 14, 2022)

Captain Danger said:


> Can someone confirm if registering the product on their website is a requirement for RMA?


I didn't have to (Germany).


----------



## Pwnstix (Apr 14, 2022)

2BitNandBand said:


> Going through samsung.com is a pain. Email the memory product email address here and tell them you want an RMA.


Awesome, thanks for the link. Does that email work for any consumer? I'm not a business owner or anything--just using this drive on a personal PC.

I guess I'll still run a full diagnostic just in case they need it. I've got all my invoice info, as well. And I guess pointing out the Uncorrectable Error Count and ECC Error Rate (and the Reallocated Sectors greater than zero) is enough to start the process.

Update: just submitted a repair ticket with TTS (I was given a link to them from a Samsung chat rep). Hopefully I can get the ball rolling on this. Also, here are the results from my full diagnostic scan:


----------



## cafu1000 (Apr 17, 2022)

Here goes another one ... this time it's a 1TB

EVO 870 1TB
Label says 01.2021, Korea
in use in desktop since April 2021 ... and only 1.6 TB written so far
Firmware SVT02B6Q (but only since yesterday)
starting in February 2022, "Reallocated Sector Count" started to climb, it's at 90 now (66% of it "achieved" yesterday)
while trying to copy data (in addition to regular backups ;-)) and performing diagnosis yesterday, "Uncorrectable Error Count" now increased to 17044
at least three files can no longer be accessed
Let's see how the RMA will go ... would be good to hear from Samsung about this somewhen. Sounds like general problems.


----------



## pinkmonkeybird (Apr 17, 2022)

Just noticed my 870 EVO 1TB starting down this path after doing some work with partitions - luckily I think I've caught it fairly early. When I first noticed, it was 9 bad sectors and 49 uncorrectable errors, and now a day later it's risen to 12 bad sectors and 1700 uncorrectable errors.

Manufactured 2021-01-21 in Korea
Been using as my Linux desktop drive since about July 2021
About 7.8 TB written
Latest SVT02B6Q firmware only since I noticed the issue starting, it was SVT01B6Q for almost all of my time using it
This has slightly soured me on this model, even later batches - I'll be replacing this with a Crucial MX500, I think.


----------



## chrcoluk (Apr 17, 2022)

PhilR said:


> Just FYI, we've tried RMAing multiple drives here in Europe, it's a joke. The disks started failing, we pulled them out of the server, stuck them on a desktop machine, ran Magician *before* and *after* the firmware upgrade. SMART does say there are errors, but the full test from Samsung M. just shows all green. Which means they won't take disks for RMA...
> 
> Here's the list of things they ask you to provide *for each disk*:
> 
> ...


Your drives are passing the full LBA test?  Everyone else (with the problems) seems to fail on that.


----------



## pcmikeymike (Apr 19, 2022)

found this thread while searching for samsung 870 failures. purchased 17+ of them in 1st half of 2021 and installed for clients.  last month i had to reinstall a laptop because of bad lba on drive in a critical windows file(laptop wouldn't boot anymore). last week i was working for another client where i installed 10 of these drives, clearing off an old user's profile from a pc and got source read errors. ran magician and found a gang of bad lba's. then i got curious and ran magician on all of the 870's i installed there. 7 of 10 have bad lba's. none of them have been able to be cloned so i'm reinstalling each pc on a new drive, about 3 to 4 hours each to reinstall, load software, get everything signed in, get it to where the user is happy with it. called samsung and they emailed a form to fill out with all of the info. going to try to get them to replace all 17 drives since i don't trust them anymore but they said that their techs will test drives they receive and send back the good units and repair the rest. grateful that prices shot up on samsung drives after a couple months of buying these and i started to get sk hynix drives. will start tracking down the other 6 drives this week to notify the owners that they'll need to be replaced asap. i've always paid the extra money for samsung reliability and have 3 of them in my 2 pc's at home right now and have purchased at least a couple hundred 850/860/970/980's over the past 4 years-very disappointed at the moment.


----------



## 2BitNandBand (Apr 25, 2022)

pcmikeymike said:


> found this thread while searching for samsung 870 failures. purchased 17+ of them in 1st half of 2021 and installed for clients.  last month i had to reinstall a laptop because of bad lba on drive in a critical windows file(laptop wouldn't boot anymore). last week i was working for another client where i installed 10 of these drives, clearing off an old user's profile from a pc and got source read errors. ran magician and found a gang of bad lba's. then i got curious and ran magician on all of the 870's i installed there. 7 of 10 have bad lba's. none of them have been able to be cloned so i'm reinstalling each pc on a new drive, about 3 to 4 hours each to reinstall, load software, get everything signed in, get it to where the user is happy with it. called samsung and they emailed a form to fill out with all of the info. going to try to get them to replace all 17 drives since i don't trust them anymore but they said that their techs will test drives they receive and send back the good units and repair the rest. grateful that prices shot up on samsung drives after a couple months of buying these and i started to get sk hynix drives. will start tracking down the other 6 drives this week to notify the owners that they'll need to be replaced asap. i've always paid the extra money for samsung reliability and have 3 of them in my 2 pc's at home right now and have purchased at least a couple hundred 850/860/970/980's over the past 4 years-very disappointed at the moment.


That's pretty rough. I wonder how wide that window of producing defective units really was.

I've got this 4TB 870 here that was produced in Nov 2021, and it's still in the store return window. Not sure if I'd be overly paranoid in exchanging it for an MX500.


----------



## Tetras (Apr 25, 2022)

2BitNandBand said:


> That's pretty rough. I wonder how wide that window of producing defective units really was.
> 
> I've got this 4TB 870 here that was produced in Nov 2021, and it's still in the store return window. Not sure if I'd be overly paranoid in exchanging it for an MX500.



If it isn't showing any symptoms (reserved blocks used or ECC errors) and survives a scan in magician (assuming you haven't formatted it since installation) then I'd feel fairly safe, for now.


----------



## floogulinc (Apr 27, 2022)

I have three 870 EVO drives all made in January or February 2021 (one of them has a SN just +4 of the other), they were all purchased 2021-04-23. All three have been throwing bad block errors in Windows event viewer as data is read and show high uncorrectable error count in SMART data. I am unable to run Samsung Magician because the drives are in a Windows Storage Spaces mirrored array and it won't recognize them.


S620NG0R108XXX (2021-01-24)S620NG0R201XXX (2021-02-08)S620NG0R201XXX (2021-02-08)








According to Event Viewer they started producing bad blocks in mid December. Thankfully Storage Spaces has been able to silently fix these bad blocks using the mirrored data so I haven't actually lost anything, my main application for these drives stores files with SHA256 hashes so I was able to verify all files were still correct.





I am of course still trying to take these out of service as soon as I can and hopefully I will be able to RMA them. I specifically spent extra on these drives for Samsung's reputation for reliability. I see this as an extreme failure on Samsung's part and I doubt I will buy their storage products again.


----------



## Pwnstix (Apr 27, 2022)

Samsung got back with me and are supposed to be shipping a replacement 870 to me soon. I don't think they took very much time inspecting my previous drive.


----------



## aaronnoraa (Apr 27, 2022)

Have two 870 EVO 1TB drives mfg dates 2021.6 and 2021.4, both purchased from different local big box stores (Office Depot, Best Buy).

Both have the same issues here, hundreds of thousands of ECC and Uncorrectable counts.  Spent 10 hours of work/waiting in reallocating sectors with HDAT2 to minimize lost data and force cloning in MediaTools Pro (nothing else would clone even after full disk scans which should reset unreadable sectors, new ones appeared so quickly Macrium, Acronis and old Ghost Corporate all failed even with verification OFF),  Media Tools ended up taking 7.75 and 9.5 hrs to clone the data off those drives after lowering retrys to 5 with forced resume. 

Used in an office environment meaning the lightest load possible both drives less than 2 TB written, after looking at Windows logs the bad blocks/read errors were going back to 2 months after purchase for one of them, both skyrocketed over the last week for unreadable sectors/bad blocks. 

Not looking forward to getting any mfg date 870 EVO drive as replacement from the RMA since I absolutely do not trust these drives anymore (company just let me purchase new SSDs immediately for replacements to get the workstations back up, RMA doesn't mean jack in the real world for companies which cannot wait two weeks nor even a day of a downed workstation waiting for RMAs to come back), really feel like either a refund or a different model is appropriate for these RMAs.

This is clearly a big problem but no way in hell is Samsung going to admit to it.


----------



## Tetras (Apr 27, 2022)

aaronnoraa said:


> Have two 870 EVO 1TB drives mfg dates 2021.6 and 2021.4, both purchased from different local big box stores (Office Depot, Best Buy).



Wow, much newer drives than most of the ones with issues  Starting to wonder if stores should even still be selling these.


----------



## BSim500 (Apr 27, 2022)

floogulinc said:


> I have three 870 EVO drives all made in *January* or February 2021 (one of them has a SN just +4 of the other), they were all purchased 2021-04-23. All three have been throwing bad block errors in Windows event viewer as data is read and show high uncorrectable error count in SMART data.





aaronnoraa said:


> Have two 870 EVO 1TB drives mfg dates *2021.6* and 2021.4, both purchased from different local big box stores (Office Depot, Best Buy). Both have the same issues here, hundreds of thousands of ECC and Uncorrectable counts.


Wait a minute, so whatever manufacturing defect there was went on undetected for *6 months*?!? That's one hell of a lot of drives affected...


----------



## aaronnoraa (Apr 28, 2022)

Was over checking out a Reddit thread about this here and came across this comment and thought it should be quoted here to help illustrate the frequency of these failures-



> 3RAD1CAT0R
> 
> I bought 14x 1TB 870 EVOs mid November 2021. 7 of them failed on the same day about a week ago with varying amounts of uncorrectable sectors. All about 850GB written, 90 days of power on time at time of failure. 3 in one 4 drive raid 0, and all 4 in another 4 drive raid 0. The remaining 1 survived a 2tbw stress test, so I'm gonna assume it's fine. Moved all content off the other 6 I have just in case, still need to stress those a bit.


Who went on to say-


> Judging by the manufacture date code in the serials, all were manufactured in September of 2021.





BSim500 said:


> Wait a minute, so whatever manufacturing defect there was went on undetected for *6 months*?!? That's one hell of a lot of drives affected...





Tetras said:


> Wow, much newer drives than most of the ones with issues  Starting to wonder if stores should even still be selling these.


Looking like at least 9 months now.


----------



## Jiginata (Apr 28, 2022)

Purchased September 26th 2021. 870 Evo1TB Serial: S5Y2NJOR101****


Check out the legendary "Samsung reliability" 870 Evo heap of junk in all it's glory. Can't even handle 6 TB's of data writing before it falls on it's arse. All marketing, zero substance.


Can anyone recommend me a a battle tested reliable 1TB SSD from a non-scam company? Preferably one that doesn't die after 6 months from general home use and please don't recommend me another Samsung SSD because I will never be buying an SSD from this company again.


THIS DRIVE SHOULD BE TAKEN OFF THE MARKET.


----------



## Captain Danger (Apr 28, 2022)

Jiginata said:


> Purchased September 26th 2021.


Manufacturing date?



Jiginata said:


> Can anyone recommend me a a battle tested reliable 1TB SSD from a non-scam company?


Crucial MX500.


----------



## ThrashZone (Apr 28, 2022)

Hi,
Think crucial has it's own issues

Sammy is fine for other series
870 evo I'm surprised it hasn't been recalled
I have several 860 evo/ 850 pro working just fine.

Look at western digital


----------



## Pwnstix (Apr 28, 2022)

My 1TB 850 Pro was the first SSD I'd ever used. I'm still using it as my OS drive on a recent reinstallation. It's been a real workhorse since I first installed it in January 2018: 27 TBW, 97% wear leveling/lifetime remaining. 

I've also had a 1TB 970 EVO NVMe in use since 2020 and it's been rock solid. 

The 4TB 870 EVO was my first SSD over 1TB and I'd just assumed that Samsung's reliability and my own luck with them so far would hold over into the 870. Hopefully the replacement I've got coming in will hold up...but I'm definitely not putting any critically important/personal data on it this time.


----------



## chrcoluk (Apr 28, 2022)

Samsung have handled this wrong in my opinion, I would have increased faith in the product if they announced a public recall, at no cost to the consumer and stated they fixed the issue.  Instead silence and a firmware which has no changelog.

Curious if 870 EVO will get replaced with a plus model.

MX500 for anyone buying one I suggest you check if you have the revised models, as the earlier one's have their own issues with massively accelerated erase cycles and potential corruption, both my MX500's now dont work properly.

My 870 EVO still clean on SMART but its only got 688 power on hours, still 0 erase cycles on 356GB host writes so at least doesnt have crazy erase cycles like the MX500.


----------



## ThrashZone (Apr 28, 2022)

Hi,
MX100 was the last good version still have some in operation and even it had bad firmware where linux will kill them in short time because trim never runs.


----------



## Yraggul666 (Apr 28, 2022)

Mine came in last week, box says fab date november 17 2021.
Haven't connected it yet, it's still in the box, i'll put it on when i upgrade the PSU, CPU, cooler, etcaetera.
With my luck it will be one from the bad batches, i wish i was wrong about that tho...


----------



## BSim500 (Apr 29, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> MX500 for anyone buying one I suggest you check if you have the revised models, as the earlier one's have their own issues with massively accelerated erase cycles and potential corruption, both my MX500's now dont work properly.


Just curious but is that stuff related to this?








						Crucial MX500 mit Firmware „M3CR033“ (2020) im Test
					

Seit 2017 wird die Crucial MX500 empfohlen, dabei wurden jüngst Firmware und Hardware angepasst. Überzeugt die Revision „M3CR033“ weiterhin?




					www.computerbase.de
				




From what I understand the original MX500 was a full sized board fully populated with 16x chips, had a SM2258H controller and an old M3CR00x-M3CR02x firmware but at some point they updated the hardware to a much shorter board with 4x higher capacity chips, different SM2259H controller and a new M3CR033 firmware? I have the new 2TB M3CR033 and it's still 100% lifespan after 6 months so it seems unaffected. Given how much crap there is going on at the moment with buggy drives, bait & switches, etc, I'm highly reluctant to "upgrade"...


----------



## iddqd (Apr 29, 2022)

My replacement drive just arrived. It was manufactured on 2022-03-24 in China according to the label on the box. It took exactly one week from pick up to delivery.

I am cautiously hopeful with it being brand new and manufactured in a different factory than the other drives before.


----------



## chrcoluk (Apr 29, 2022)

BSim500 said:


> Just curious but is that stuff related to this?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


To this.  Also a thread on toms hardware forums with far more info.









						MX500 rapid erase cycles, seems to be poor wear levelling
					

Hi guys  So I decided to open up crystal diskinfo on my laptop, I replaced the SSD with a brand new 500 GB MX500 earlier this year.  Usually I use Samsung SSD's.  The 94% health took me by surprise, as the SSD is not even half a year old, and the laptop is just running windows, no games, no...




					www.techpowerup.com
				




From what I understand its the newest revisions which have it fixed, not the oldest one. Mine is on the newest firmware for its hardware revision which is *M3CR023 *https://uk.crucial.com/support/ssd-support/mx500-support. There is I think 3 hardware revisions where crucial decided not to change the SKU model number, like samsung does with say 860 to 870 e.g. *Yours is the second revision which I think is ok*. (I am curious if the first hw revision works ok on its original very old firmware, mine pre shipped with the newest firmware).

The issues with my MX500 is what led me to buy my 870 EVO only to then discover this thread lol.


----------



## floogulinc (Apr 30, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> The issues with my MX500 is what led me to buy my 870 EVO only to then discover this thread lol.



Exactly, when I bought my 870s a year ago I had originally purchased 3 MX500s but returned them for the Samsungs after reading about their issues. Obviously that hasn't turned out well lol

At this point I would probably replace the 870s with MX500s if I wasn't moving to enterprise NVMe U.2 drives.


----------



## Chrispy_ (Apr 30, 2022)

Ah shit, just spotted this thread and have a couple of 870EVO 2TB drives caching a QNAP rack NAS :\


----------



## 2BitNandBand (May 2, 2022)

Just got my replacement 1TB 870. Took about two weeks from shipping off the bad drive, so not too bad. The replacement is brand new, March 2022 manufacture date.

Definitely gonna keep an eye on my 4TB 870, though. Reading through this thread it seems drives manufactured as late as Sept 2021 are having issues, and my 4TB was manufactured Nov 2021, so not too much later. Also, mine came with earlier firmware (which I since updated). I wonder if it's possible bad firmware could cause the physical failure...probably not, but I don't know enough about how they work.


----------



## Chrispy_ (May 2, 2022)

I spec'ed a pair of 1TB 970 Pro for my NAS (MLC, high endurance rating) but the supplier suggested capacity mattered more than endurance so I went with the EVOs.
The NAS write cache is getting hammered right now as about 300TB of data is being seeded to it. If they're going to die, they'll probably do it soon. Once the data's seeded I doubt the SSDs will get much more of a workout than a regular consumer drive.

Manufacturing date was Nov 2021 so I might be okay?


----------



## Tetras (May 2, 2022)

Chrispy_ said:


> I spec'ed a pair of 1TB 970 Pro for my NAS (MLC, high endurance rating) but the supplier suggested capacity mattered more than endurance so I went with the EVOs.
> The NAS write cache is getting hammered right now as about 300TB of data is being seeded to it. If they're going to die, they'll probably do it soon. Once the data's seeded I doubt the SSDs will get much more of a workout than a regular consumer drive.
> 
> Manufacturing date was Nov 2021 so I might be okay?



*9*70 or *8*70? The 970 m.2 drives are unaffected, as far as we know.


----------



## Chrispy_ (May 2, 2022)

Oh shit, *9*70; 

i r dum:





At least I can sleep soundly tonight.


----------



## Pwnstix (May 4, 2022)

Just got my replacement in. Made in Korea, fab date of 2022 03 03. S/N: S6BBNS0T10****

Started the whole process in the 3rd week of April (~19th). TTS received it on the 21st and Samsung support got back with me early the next week, shipped my replacement (according to UPS tracking info) on April 27.  The whole process took around two weeks.

Hopefully this one holds up. I'm staying subscribed to this thread and will check back now and then. Until later, good luck to everyone!

edit: just got it installed. I wonder if it's a refurb, because I see a Power-on Count, POR Recovery Count, and some Total LBAs Written. Also not showing any new firmware available through Magician.


----------



## Blaeza (May 5, 2022)

I've got 2 870 evos but they are only 1tb. Am I safe?


----------



## ThrashZone (May 5, 2022)

JKRsega said:


> I've got 2 870 evos but they are only 1tb. Am I safe?


Hi,
Read the op and run the tests, but yes some 1tb have also been effected.








						Samsung 870 EVO - Beware, certain batches prone to failure!
					

Certain 870 EVO 4TB and 2TB drives are affected by early failures where they develop uncorrectable errors and some data just cannot be read from them anymore. This seems to primarily affect drives produced in January/February 2021. For example, i have three 870 EVO 4TB, only one is affected (so...




					www.techpowerup.com


----------



## Blaeza (May 7, 2022)

Looks like I'm all good. Just did the checks and seems my drives are all in order. Noice.


----------



## chrcoluk (May 21, 2022)

My laptop has a nasty data corruption problem but there is no SMART errors, and the LBA test passes (albeit slower than it should).  So potentially my drive is in the process of failing.  But not sure.

At the very least it looks like I am going to have to recover an older backup, the registry managing VSS is corrupt which is a real nasty problem.

--  Restored C: drive from 5 day old backup and issues have gone so was corrupted registry, will keep doing backups and keep an eye on things.


----------



## unspecified_error (May 21, 2022)

Howdy, folks.  I just found my own 870 EVO 1TB to have this problem.  Many thanks to the OP for bringing it to light.  I was just checking another failed SSD (an 850 EVO) here on my PC using Samsung Magician when I noted the red 'Critical' SMART warnings on the 870.  A quick search on the subject brought me to this thread.  I started backing the data up immediately but ran into problems then as corrupted files ultimately halted the usual Windows backup process.  As the backup process progressed though I could see the drive health % plummet in CrystalDiskInfo and watched the Reallocated Sector Count climb as it failed to read numerous sectors.  In the end I just did a manual folder-by-folder, file-by-file copy skipping the unreadable files to get the most important stuff off.  I don't think I've lost too much that isn't replaceable thankfully but there was quite a few unreadable files in there - 10's or 100's I'd say, though maybe only equating to a low percentage of the overall stored data (around 650 GB).  It'll be going back to the supplier for RMA on Monday.


----------



## unspecified_error (May 24, 2022)

Just an update to add more details. Of interest, prior to RMA'ing the drive I wiped it using Minitool's wipe facility (randomised 0/1 write). After the wipe completed I ran full scan and short/extended SMART tests using Samsung Magician once more with the result being that this time they passed/showed clear, with SM stating the drive to be in good condition. I gathered this to be because the to-date 369 failed sectors spanning the entirety of the drive had now been fully recognised and reallocated, but I'm not entirely sure, though the raw SMART info from SM and Crystal Disk Info did still indicate the Reallocated Sector Count, Uncorrectable Error Count, and ECC Error Rate to be high ("Critical" in SM), so thankfully it did still show the faulting issue (to help make the RMA process easier). I wouldn't like to trust it to hold data from this point though as I guess another ~369 sectors could go tits-up in the next ~8 months use again. I don't know how many reallocatable sectors the drive has in total, but I assumed around 1024 judging by the numbers I saw, particularly as the CDI health percentage dropped as the reallocated sector count increased during data recovery. Anyway, the RMA went painlessly and I got it replaced with a 2022-01 model which hopefully won't have this issue. I'll be keeping a closer eye on things from now on though to be sure. Regards.


----------



## Captain Danger (May 24, 2022)

Is shipping back the drive to Samsung a must/requirement for RMA or did anyone get replacement without that?

Do they create a shipping label for it, and to which country exactly?

My 1 TB 870 EVO is still doing fine but I am concerned about it in the longer run as manufacturing date suggests it is from bad batch. My country doesn't allow any computer items/electronics to be sent outside the country for RMA through DHL/FedEx etc - they have banned any such export.   So I wanted to know if it will be possible for me to get a replacement without sending them the drive if need be.


----------



## unspecified_error (May 24, 2022)

Captain Danger said:


> Is shipping back the drive to Samsung a must/requirement for RMA or did anyone get replacement without that?


I just returned mine to the retail store I bought it from.  They have all the details on record of when it was purchased.  Presumably they'll fire it back to their suppliers, and ultimately Samsung or some official Samsung representative along the line will take responsibility.


----------



## xorbe (May 25, 2022)

I mirrored my drive, upgraded the firmware, overwrote the whole drive with random data, then restored the mirror, and trimmed the drive.  Will just use it as my Steam library drive I guess.  It only had 1 failed LBA beforehand.


----------



## Zeromis (Jun 3, 2022)

Just had two of these 2TB drives show the same symptoms. One was installed in the summer last year and the other I got in Autumn. That said they both have a manufacturing date in April. Luckily they both didn't have much important on, was just media files and games for the most part, and anything I didn't want to lose was backed up on a external anyway. Still quite annoying though and something I really wouldn't expect.

I just happened to be doing a routine check up of my drives and noticed one of my drives had around 5 uncorrectable errors, the other one showed 0 at that point. Was a bit worried but left it a bit to see if that rose, and it did by a few. Following that I did checks via the Samsung software (during this time I installed the new firmware too) and also chkdsk and the number sky rocketed on both drives. Also found some random files which were no longer readable. Fortunately not too many corrupted files, was just a few games easily fixed by a integrity check, think I managed to at least catch this reasonably early. Since then I've copied all my files off the drives and onto a new MX500 4TB SSD while I sort the situation out. Did see that the MX500 was having issues too, but think that must have been fixed in recent models as I bought one late 2020 with a newer firmware and it's been perfect since then - which lead me to buy this 4TB(that and a really good discount lol).

Interestingly the one I installed last summer actually had less written to it, only around 2TB, and yet the issue had progressed further on that one. With around 6 more reallocated sectors totalling just under 40 and around 5000 in uncorrectable errors. In comparison the Autumn one had around 5TB written to and it had around 1500 uncorrectable errors. 

Honestly it's a good job I checked really, this seems like something that's really going to sneak up on people. You might not notice it until it's too late. It's kinda put me off buying any Samsung SSDs in the future really. Shame really as I used to trust them having had a number of their drives with no problems and good performance.


----------



## chrcoluk (Jun 4, 2022)

Its a nasty situation, reviewers cant realistically test what happens when a device is been used as a daily driver for several months, even those endurance tests done some years back were not realistic as they only emulated erase cycles but not time or power off data retention either.

I think one way to push these manufacturers in to been more honest is if media sites were prepared to expand on educating to people to the problems by publishing articles, e.g. I did offer my MX500 to Wizzard for testing but he wasnt interested, would I blacklist either Crucial or Samsung from future purchases though?  Probably not as then I would eventually run out of vendors products to buy.  Every now and then people make bad products.  The problem is though because of the "pretending it doesnt exist" attitude us consumers have no idea if this problem still exists on drives been manufactured today, and if it has been fixed, at which point was it fixed? We are in the dark.  The MX500 situation we know at least the newer revisions are fixed, but because there was no model number change you still run the risk of buying a first revision when ordering one.  Its these issues that create the distrust in the companies.

When I next buy an SSD I may consider Hynix as I think what both these companies have done is wrong.


----------



## Lake_Cities_6 (Jun 7, 2022)

November 2021, I purchased a 1TB 870 EVO and a 2TB 870 QVO.   Both made in Korea.  QVO date is 9-11-21, EVO date is 10-24-21.  Both drives have been in low write/heavy read situations.  QVO is fine, EVO just started throwing red blocks in Magician and critical alerts in SMART, which led me to discovering this thread.  The problematic 870 EVO was only loaded (once) with 311 GB.  As of today, it has endured a total of 320 GB written.  0.3 TB written.  In 7 mos I've only re-written 9 gb.  Creampuff assignment.

Whatever the problem is, it is hardly impacted or influenced by TBW.  

As I was watching the full scan run, the first pass revealed only 2 red blocks, but on other blocks the scan often stalled and churned for awhile, before turning blue with the scan continuing on.   With each additional scan pass, more red blocks began appearing in those spots where the previous scan took an extra long pause.  Blocks were going from blue (good) to red (bad) right before my eyes, from one pass to the next.

I have one additional unopened 1TB 870 EVO that is within 2 days of its return window.  Made in Thailand and a date of 2-7-22.  I am returning it to the store tomorrow.


----------



## imeem1 (Jun 15, 2022)

Today I noticed my whole system was hanging and unresponsive like I never seen b4. IDK how to read SMART data but this doesn't seem good. Samsun Magician started showing failing LBA and the software itself became unresponsive  as well even after closing and opening it again.  I bought my SSD is March 2021. Made in January 17th 2021.  Data written is 4.796 TB.

What do I need to prove to Samsung in order to RMA my SSD?


----------



## Captain Danger (Jun 15, 2022)

imeem1 said:


> What do I need to prove to Samsung in order to RMA my SSD?


Showing them the Reallocated Sector Count > 0 should be good enough as someone stated earlier in the thread in Reply #85.


----------



## CiTay (Jun 15, 2022)

imeem1 said:


> IDK how to read SMART data but this doesn't seem good.



Like i said in the original post, you have all the telltale signs of being fully affected.

*1) Elevated "Reallocated Sector Count", "Used Reserve Block" and "Runtime Bad Block" count
2) Non-zero "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate", and especially if those two keep rising when you read/write files
(they usually rise a lot when you try to copy all data off it in preparation for RMA)*

When you do the RMA, Samsung will tell you exactly what they need. Keep us posted about the progress in here if you can, i'd appreciate it.
Normally there should be no problems at all getting an RMA with your drive's symptoms.


----------



## Zeromis (Jun 16, 2022)

imeem1 said:


> Today I noticed my whole system was hanging and unresponsive like I never seen b4. IDK how to read SMART data but this doesn't seem good. Samsun Magician started showing failing LBA and the software itself became unresponsive  as well even after closing and opening it again.  I bought my SSD is March 2021. Made in January 17th 2021.  Data written is 4.796 TB.
> 
> What do I need to prove to Samsung in order to RMA my SSD?
> 
> ...


I sent them a screenshot of the SMART page in Samsung Magician and a screenshot of the diagnostic scan in Samsung Magician showing up a lot of LBA errors in my opening email. After that they just asked me to send a bunch of photos of the physical drive and a receipt to start the RMA process.  

Unfortunately I could only get the receipt for one of the two drives since the other one was a unused disk from work that got given to me. Consequently that one I'm just using to store steam games from now on which I can easily re-download if the issue shows again - so far I've not seen any further issues with it though. The reallocated blocks/errors are unchanged. I assume the firmware probably did fix the underlying problem but it can't really revert the damage already done, ie the lost blocks.


----------



## imeem1 (Jun 17, 2022)

CiTay said:


> Like i said in the original post, you have all the telltale signs of being fully affected.
> 
> *1) Elevated "Reallocated Sector Count", "Used Reserve Block" and "Runtime Bad Block" count
> 2) Non-zero "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate", and especially if those two keep rising when you read/write files
> ...





Zeromis said:


> o drives since the other one was a unused disk from work that got given to me. Consequently that one I'm just using to store steam games from now on which I can easily re-download if the issue shows again - so far I've not seen any further issues with it though. The reallocated blocks/errors are unchanged. I assume t



so I submitted a RMA request on Samsung Canada website and I mentioned my symptoms from above + the SMART results (no screenshots needed). They gave me a ticket number and someone was suppose to contact me. I got impatient so I called 1-2 days after and I quoted my ticket number. Guy told me to send picture of receipt + the SSD. Then he provided me a letter that basically says Samsung doesn't deal with warranties directly and told me to go to my store of purchase and show them the letter.

at the store, they run some test and they gave me a brand new drive.  manufacture date is July 29, 2021.  I asked him if there was a 2022 one, but this was the last one.


----------



## Zeromis (Jun 17, 2022)

imeem1 said:


> so I submitted a RMA request on Samsung Canada website and I mentioned my symptoms from above + the SMART results (no screenshots needed). They gave me a ticket number and someone was suppose to contact me. I got impatient so I called 1-2 days after and I quoted my ticket number. Guy told me to send picture of receipt + the SSD. Then he provided me a letter that basically says Samsung doesn't deal with warranties directly and told me to go to my store of purchase and show them the letter.
> 
> at the store, they run some test and they gave me a brand new drive.  manufacture date is July 29, 2021.  I asked him if there was a 2022 one, but this was the last one.


Admittedly in the case of the EU Samsung SSD support I had to contact a specific email address for warranty support since Samsung themselves don't seem to handle it. That said it wasn't too difficult to get it, just a quick contact of their online chat. Not sure why they don't just put it up on their website though.


----------



## imeem1 (Jun 18, 2022)

is there a consensus that we should update firmware from SVT01B6Q to SVT02B6Q?


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## CiTay (Jun 18, 2022)

Yes, definitely update your firmware.


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## chrcoluk (Jun 18, 2022)

imeem1 said:


> is there a consensus that we should update firmware from SVT01B6Q to SVT02B6Q?


Logic says yes, but I tend to refuse when there is no changelog.  So i havent lol.  Bad logic I know.

My second reason is I suspect they may accelerate the erase cycles on the new firmware to get round whatever problems are occurring although people are still reporting broken drives on the new firmware, so dont know.


----------



## CiTay (Jun 18, 2022)

They're not stupid at Samsung. They will have knowledge of this fault (of course they don't publically admit it, which history will show if it's stupid or clever). So perhaps the new firmware does something to prevent it in some cases. I much rather have the drive wear out a bit faster than to have it develop bad sectors which can't be read at all anymore.


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## Zeromis (Jun 18, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> Logic says yes, but I tend to refuse when there is no changelog.  So i havent lol.  Bad logic I know.
> 
> My second reason is I suspect they may accelerate the erase cycles on the new firmware to get round whatever problems are occurring although people are still reporting broken drives on the new firmware, so dont know.


Well the firmware can't fix the damage already done, so if they updated the firmware after the problem already manifested the drive would still be dead even if the firmware did manage to fix the underlying cause. 

So far I've not had any more issues showing since installing the firmware and identifying all the previous errors/bad sectors. It's not been too long though, so guess we'll see long term.


----------



## Blaeza (Jun 19, 2022)

So I previously enquired about my 870 EVO's.  I also must be having the dumb...


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## ahmadmob (Jul 30, 2022)

Hello guys.

So reading this topic and some topics on Reddit it looks like no one has yet to report any issues with drives manufactured Nov2021 or after.  I won't take the date thing as a solid indicator but that's the only thing we have to differentiate between these drives to know if they are good or not.

Anyway, I ordered a 4TB 870 EVO from Amazon a few days ago and will get it in a few days, I wish I knew about these issues beforehand. Wouldn't be an easy process to cancel it now as it entered the shipping process. I just hope I get one that's made anywhere in 2022.


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## chrcoluk (Jul 30, 2022)

ahmadmob said:


> Hello guys.
> 
> So reading this topic and some topics on Reddit it looks like no one has yet to report any issues with drives manufactured Nov2021 or after.  I won't take the date thing as a solid indicator but that's the only thing we have to differentiate between these drives to know if they are good or not.
> 
> Anyway, I ordered a 4TB 870 EVO from Amazon a few days ago and will get it in a few days, I wish I knew about these issues beforehand. Wouldn't be an easy process to cancel it now as it entered the shipping process. I just hope I get one that's made anywhere in 2022.


I think we need more time, its kind of like how it was originally thought to be no later than March, it could simply be that those drives are still too new to trigger the problems.

Sadly with Samsung been silent we all left guessing, they think they increasing confidence in their product by staying silent, but if they released a statement like this, I would have no issue buying a new 870 EVO "We have discovered a defect in the 870 EVO SKU, and wish to apologise to those customers affected, this is now fixed in batches produced from DD/MM/YY so you can rest assured on buying a 870 EVO".


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## ahmadmob (Jul 30, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> I think we need more time, its kind of like how it was originally thought to be no later than March, it could simply be that those drives are still too new to trigger the problems.
> 
> Sadly with Samsung been silent we all left guessing, they think they increasing confidence in their product by staying silent, but if they released a statement like this, I would have no issue buying a new 870 EVO "We have discovered a defect in the 870 EVO SKU, and wish to apologise to those customers affected, this is now fixed in batches produced from DD/MM/YY so you can rest assured on buying a 870 EVO".


True, Samsung should definitely issue a statement like this and it would be much better for them than to stay silent! What you said makes a lot of sense about needing more time to be sure about the new drives, however I asked a guy on reddit today about his 8 months replacement drive and he answered that it's working good so far after 8 months of use (didn't ask him about the date of the replacement drive though). So fingers crossed about the new drive batches. Here's the thread where I asked him: 




__
		https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/r4rcqg/_/hmrw47g

*Edit: *I was able to cancel my 870 EVO 4TB order, as the more I read about these 870 EVO drives the more I find horror stories about them.

Do you guys recommend the Crucial MX500 4TB? I saw some people here (or can't remember exactly where) saying that it had issues with some batches regarding firmware or build quality, is this still true or was that only with the lower capacity early revisions?
I was also looking at the WD Blue SSD 4TB, which one would you recommend out of these two drives?


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## exxos (Aug 16, 2022)

I just found this thread as my 870 QVO 1TB died out of the blue yesterday. Dated 2021.07.

I've got 2 of them. My main C: drive and the now failed backup drive. Though its totally died. Even the bios no longer sees it. I've done all the usual swap cables and tried on my laptop. No luck. The other 870 still seems fine but now thinking I don't trust it anymore. Its not like the back up drive had much use even.


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## CiTay (Aug 19, 2022)

870 QVO problems are unrelated to what we see with the 870 EVO. And sudden death is not consistent with the symptoms we have seen here. So i would say, that is very unfortunate, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with these potential problems of the early 870 EVO batches.


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## Mussels (Aug 19, 2022)

ahmadmob said:


> True, Samsung should definitely issue a statement like this and it would be much better for them than to stay silent! What you said makes a lot of sense about needing more time to be sure about the new drives, however I asked a guy on reddit today about his 8 months replacement drive and he answered that it's working good so far after 8 months of use (didn't ask him about the date of the replacement drive though). So fingers crossed about the new drive batches. Here's the thread where I asked him:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


The MX500's have pretty low TBW values, like the QVO drives.
WD greens are atrocious.

People bag out the QVO's for the lower writes and lifespan, so keep that in mind here

QVO:




MX500 - similar life to the QVO
700 vs 720, close enough IMO.




WD blues makes the MX500 look good
720 to 500? Nah.




WD actually hide the green drives TBW and don't list it, but reviews and news websites have it before they hid the values
So you know, these make even the garbage blues look good.





TL;DR: These drives make QVO's look good.


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## 80251 (Sep 1, 2022)

My old Samsung 850 Pro SSD's are only rated to 150 TBW although after years of service the most written to SSD only has 5.6 TBW.

After someone here on TPU wrote that controller failures account for most SSD failures I have to wonder how relevant TBW figures are.


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## nomdeplume (Sep 1, 2022)

80251 said:


> My old Samsung 850 Pro SSD's are only rated to 150 TBW although after years of service the most written to SSD only has 5.6 TBW.
> 
> After someone here on TPU wrote that controller failures account for most SSD failures I have to wonder how relevant TBW figures are.



Due to ongoing conflicts I will make mention alone of a _constant write test_ performed on a few hundred SSD make/model to explore TBW.  In the case of a 500GB Samsung 850 Pro it overperformed by better than an order of magnitude.  The next gen of Samsung NVMe were better yet in the TBW category.  840 SSD showed only slightly less endurance than the 850.  Obviously drive memory size matters in relation to performance capability and this was a solitary data point.  2TB does appear to have multiple advantages over 256GB. 

Over the full course of this test it became apparent that a known high quality controller, good programming/firmware, and build quality could be undone by a bad pairing of memory to controller.  Net effect being sufficient memory and memory quality were often still abundant at point of failure.  A controller that intially appeared to be performing well increasingly got its signals crossed and left a very short window of reporting to notice it in a monitoring program.  Taking some memory etc down with it that did show up as a reduction of drive life.  Sometimes cataclysmically, but more often very subtly with only a few percentage points of life dropping within a short timeframe.

NVMe do appear to have better reporting capability.  Better insight into corrections taken and actual signs they are struggling.  The only SSD that reported stairstepping failures down to red level warnings on Crystal Disk actually had lower quality memory that was dying.


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## ajsmsg78 (Sep 11, 2022)

I had installed one of these in a clients machine in May and four months later (a few days ago) they were getting all sorts of blue screens and random windows crashes.  The drive was slowly starting to die.   The date on it was 2021.11 so these issues go further than just the batches from early to mid 2021.


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## 80251 (Sep 11, 2022)

I had been considering buying a 4 TiB 870 EVO, but went with the much slower 4 TiB 870 QVO. The 870 EVO seems to be the most failure prone SSD Samsung has ever manufactured and I'm surprised Samsung has kept completely silent about it.


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## ReachJuggernog (Sep 19, 2022)

Thought I'd make an account to add to the growing list of failing drives here, I bought a Samsung 870 EVO 4TB in October 2021, and it's failing *bad.*
I used it to store all my games, so nothing important was stored on it, but since I don't play much of them these days I didn't notice how bad the failures were until I stumbled across Event Viewer basically spamming the logs with "this drive has a bad block".

Tried scanning it with Samsung Magician, a process that should have taken around 3-4 hours with a 4TB drive, but it was still scanning 12 hours later and had only completed around 20% of the drive because of all the failures.

Attached is some drive failure p_rn for all of you, using Samsung Magician's Diagnostic Scan
(talking to support now to get some kind of compensation, preferably a refund)


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## CiTay (Sep 19, 2022)

When was the drive made? It's written on the sticker.


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## ReachJuggernog (Sep 19, 2022)

CiTay said:


> When was the drive made? It's written on the sticker.


I'm in the process of making sure I've gotten everything off that's remotely "important" off that drive (some game configs etc), so I haven't taken the drive out yet.
Based on my serial number and this site: https://technastic.com/check-manufacturing-date-samsung-devices/
I'm putting my date of manufacture at July 2021. My serial number being S6BCNJ0*R7*00----
R7 being the key 8 and 9th digit in that which would put my drive on that date.
Applying the same method to another person's serial number earlier in this thread (S62BNJ0*NC*62) and them reporting their date of manufacture in December 2020, "NC" (according to that site) would confirm that the drive was manufactured in December 2020.

Some more evidence of it failing, "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate" are critical according to Samsung Magician.


Model NameSamsung SSD 870 EVO 4TBSerial NumberS6BCNJ0R700----Drive TypeSATAResultIDDescriptionThresholdCurrent ValueWorst ValueRaw Data5​Reallocated Sector Count10​43​43​2706​OK9​Power-on Hours0​98​98​5522​OK12​Power-on Count0​99​99​360​OK177​Wear Leveling Count0​99​99​7​OK179​Used Reserved Block Count (total)10​43​43​2706​OK181​Program Fail Count (total)10​100​100​0​OK182​Erase Fail Count (total)10​100​100​0​OK183​Runtime Bad Count (total)10​43​43​2706​OK187​Uncorrectable Error Count0​54​54​459507​CRITICAL190​Airflow Temperature0​79​45​21​OK195​ECC Error Rate0​199​199​459507​CRITICAL199​CRC Error Count0​100​100​0​OK235​POR Recovery Count0​99​99​2​OK241​Total LBAs Written0​99​99​32146165156​OK


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## CiTay (Sep 19, 2022)

Yep, as i mentioned in another reply before, that is an epic amount of ECC errors now, but it's to be expected. The drive is retrying over and over again to read out the bad sectors - due to your full drive scan - and stalling for seconds on each sector it can't read. The SSD basically tried half a million times to read the almost 3000 bad sectors, unsuccessfully.

That's not one of the earliest manufacturing dates, but still heavily affected...


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## ReachJuggernog (Sep 19, 2022)

CiTay said:


> Yep, as i mentioned in another reply before, that is an epic amount of ECC errors now, but it's to be expected. The drive is retrying over and over again to read out the bad sectors - due to your full drive scan - and stalling for seconds on each sector it can't read. The SSD basically tried half a million times to read the almost 3000 bad sectors, unsuccessfully.
> 
> That's not one of the earliest manufacturing dates, but still heavily affected...


Crazy that Samsung has seemingly offered no warning about this? I posted this in a Discord server with a few friends and one of them picked up the same drive not long after mine, so he's gunna check he's also not having the same issue.


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## CiTay (Sep 19, 2022)

Funny thing though: I did not RMA my drive (the failed one from the first post) yet, to see how it develops, and so far, it hasn't developed any new bad sectors. Maybe the newest firmware SVT02B6Q prevents that somehow. I filled the drive to the brim a couple times (0 bytes free space), but it seems that once you have deleted the files which contained the bad sectors, those bad sectors are indeed mapped to intact ones and are not written to again. This is how i never got another bad file to this date, and the bad sector count remained the same at 329 for that drive.

I will RMA it eventually, but i thought this is an interesting observation. I purposely use this drive more heavily than before (of course only for files i can easily download again), but ever since i deleted the bad files, the drive is behaving. Bad sectors seem reallocated to good ones and no new bad ones developing.


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## chrcoluk (Sep 20, 2022)

I've got speculations in my head as to whats possibly going on, but ultimately the question would be why ditch the 860 EVO skew for a new skew that has no performance/marketing advantage over the older one?  Answer possibly to increase margins due to cheaper components.  Is the nand the same binning quality?


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## E.S (Sep 22, 2022)

CiTay said:


> and so far, it hasn't developed any new bad sectors. Maybe the newest firmware SVT02B6Q prevents that somehow.


SVT02B6Q may not have solved the problem.

I updated to SVT02B6Q after having the same problem as you guys.
After that I had no problems for 9 months.

But today, the value of the ID "FC" in CDI increased. This "FC" was added in SVT02B6Q.

This is described as "Vendor Specific", but after looking it up, it appears to be S.M.A.R.T 252  "Newly Added Bad Flash Block".

If this value continues to increase, it may indicate an increase in bad blocks.
If so, maybe the problem is not resolved?


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## CiTay (Sep 22, 2022)

I don't know how much credence i give to a value whose meaning is not even 100% certain. If i actually see Bad Blocks increase, that's a different story.


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## E.S (Sep 22, 2022)

S.M.A.R.T 252 is described on wikipedia as follows: 
"The Newly Added Bad Flash Block attribute indicates the total number of bad flash blocks the drive detected since it was first initialized in manufacturing."

I don't know if this explanation is correct, but I think it's probably an item about bad blocks. I think you should be careful with this value.


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## CiTay (Sep 22, 2022)

If we look at it logically, every SSD has some bad blocks, because no NAND Flash is perfect. For example on a brand new Sandisk 2TB it will always be well over 1000 bad blocks from factory. But those are counted seperate from the "Grown Bad Blocks", and as long as those bad blocks have been mapped with good ones and the user data will never be affected, that's not a problem. This is the main criteria here: The data on the SSD should never become corrupted or unable to be read. And this seems to happen when the values increase which i mentioned in the initial post.

I will keep an eye on the mystery "Vendor specific" data (for which my affected 870 EVO shows 1349, one unaffected one shows 0 and the other unaffected one shows 1210), and i will certainly accept it as an early warning sign when this should translate into real bad blocks later, but so far it's just anecdotal evidence. So there's no need to panic IMO, just calmy watch how the SMART data develops further.


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## E.S (Sep 23, 2022)

CiTay said:


> I will keep an eye on the mystery "Vendor specific" data (for which my affected 870 EVO shows 1349, one unaffected one shows 0 and the other unaffected one shows 1210), and i will certainly accept it as an early warning sign when this should translate into real bad blocks later, but so far it's just anecdotal evidence. So there's no need to panic IMO, just calmy watch how the SMART data develops further.


I understand.
Our problem maybe happens thousands of hours after writing the data. This increase in S.M.A.R.T 252 occurred 9 months after recovery.
Maybe isolated the problematic block as "Newly Added Bad Flash Block".
What I fear is that this value may continue to increase in the future.


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## E.S (Sep 24, 2022)

This forum cares about the date of manufacture, but I don't think it matters. I searched the internet for many CDI images of the 870 evo, If you use the old farm for 2000 to 5000 hours, there seems to be a high probability that the problem will occur. I don't understand why samsung doesn't product recall or explain.


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## Captain Danger (Sep 26, 2022)

Since we have a speculation about the "Vendor Specific" value, mine has increased from 80 to 100, so just wanted to share. Everything else still looks just fine.


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## 80251 (Sep 26, 2022)

In Samsung Magician I have no FC value (252 base 10) in the SMART values for my 870 QVO 4 TiB. Total LBA's Written in the last SMART value indicated in Samsung Magician's SMART for all three of my Samsung SSD's (870 QVO and 2 850 Pros).


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## E.S (Oct 6, 2022)

SMART-Parameter "FC" increased by one again today.
It may continue to increase.
Very disappointing.

It is my speculation, but after writing data, some problem may occur after several thousand hours.


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## CiTay (Oct 6, 2022)

One one of my unaffected drives it went from 1210 two weeks ago to 1222 now. Still no bad sectors. For me, it can do whatever it wants, as long as there are no new bad sectors later.


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## MEMANIAsama (Oct 7, 2022)

Chiming in as this is one of the first forums I found when googling my issue to figure out what was going on. At first I assumed it was my HDD I've been using for ages but was shocked to find out it was my SSD I bought in January 2022. I have a *870 EVO 2TB SSD (MZ-77E2T0B/AM)*. As you can see by the screenshot I've got those dreaded little red circles in Samsung Magician in Uncorrectable Error Count and ECC Error Rate. Not sure particularly on the manufacture date of my device, haven't checked. I have a firmware update I can do, but I assume that won't magically fix my SSD, the damage is done. I've got to call Samsung directly on their 800 number (blah) to request an RMA because their website allowing me to submit a repair request ticket for it for some reason. Is there anything else I need to provide them or be prepared for?


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## E.S (Oct 7, 2022)

Please read the forum from the beginning before asking questions.
You may also want to read this forum.








						2 x Samsung EVO 870 4 TB nach knapp einem Jahr mit defekten Sektoren
					

Hallo liebes Forum!  Ich stehe momentan ein bisschen auf der Leitung, denn ich habe ein kurioses Problem, das ich so noch nie bei einen meiner SSD angetroffen habe.  Seit gut 10 Jahren verwende ich Samsung SSD, derzeit ua 2 x Samsung EVO 870 4 TB (neben einer 980 Pro und einer älteren 860 Pro)...




					www.computerbase.de


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## MEMANIAsama (Oct 7, 2022)

E.S said:


> You may also want to read this forum.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Ah, that's not in a language I know so not much help for me unfortunately. Thanks though. I've read through the forum but can't make heads or tails of some stuff (this isn't an area I'm too familiar or understanding of.) It looks like a Crucial is one of my next best bet for a SATA SSD even though that had its own share of problems?


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## Fry178 (Oct 7, 2022)

i ve seen most data centers like blaze have reported more than once, that its usually the controller that dies, roughly 25% after 2y of use.
since i build for friends/family, i go through a couple of drives per year, either because of storage need, or because a drive didn't perform as expected (+5GB/s), and lots of them Samsungs, especially early ones.
yet i had none of the fail, incl the 870 im using for almost 2y noe, as i wanted mlc for backup drive, but 2 crucials and one OCZ went from working to unreadable within a week.
then again, i back up important stuff to 3 drives in 2 locations, and never buy the same brand/drive twice, so i dont end up like a customer coming to the shop with 4 dead HDDs from his raid (2006)..


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## E.S (Oct 7, 2022)

CiTay said:


> One one of my unaffected drives it went from 1210 two weeks ago to 1222 now. Still no bad sectors. For me, it can do whatever it wants, as long as there are no new bad sectors later.


What I'm worried about is that the value that should be counted in SMART ID "05" (reallocated sector count) is replaced with SMART ID "FC" to deceive it? That's what it means.
If so, the continued increase in "FC" is a problem.


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## CiTay (Oct 7, 2022)

MEMANIAsama said:


> I have a firmware update I can do, but I assume that won't magically fix my SSD, the damage is done.



The damage to some of your data is done (those files that are partly stored in bad sectors), but the SSD can be brought back to a fully usable state. I've been using my affected SSD for over 10 months now and the original bad sectors have been remapped with good ones, as well as no new ones developing (probably thanks to the firmware update). Of course, i don't fully trust this SSD anymore, and i shall RMA it eventually, but the SSD can recover from the problem.

Of course  there are still many inexcusable things with this failure, for example that it happens without much use, that it makes some files unreadable, that it happens on what's supposed to be the best SATA SSD model. But once you get all your intact files off the drive and delete the couple affected files that can't be fully read out anymore, then the drive should remap the bad sectors and you will have the full capacity worth of good sectors again. And so far the newest firmware has prevented any new bad sectors. But yeah, i won't hold it against you if you RMA even with this information.


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## Fry178 (Oct 7, 2022)

Not sure why some here to expect consumer grade hw not to fail (at all).
Ignoring that this might have been preventable in some form (by Samsung),
anything just close to +99% reliability will cost multiple times more, one reason mil/space stuff isnt cheap.


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## CiTay (Oct 7, 2022)

Fry178 said:


> Not sure why some here to expect consumer grade hw not to fail (at all).
> Ignoring that this might have been preventable in some form (by Samsung),
> anything just close to +99% reliability will cost multiple times more, one reason mil/space stuff isnt cheap.



You see, Samsung SSDs have been statistically the most reliable component inside a PC, with failure rates well below 1%: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Samsung-SATA-SSD-s-Amazing-Reliability-772/

So when the latest and greatest SATA SSD of them - which costs a pretty penny BTW, i think i paid around 390€ for each of my three 870 EVO 4TB - suddenly can have this kind of fault, without any kind of warning or depending on how much you used it etc., just somewhat depening on certain batches, then this is unexpected, in the truest sense of the word. I absolutely expect these SSDs not to fail, overall. Single ones, yes, you can always get one bad one of anything. But look at this thread, faults left, right and center, and not a word from Samsung about it.


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## MEMANIAsama (Oct 7, 2022)

CiTay said:


> The damage to some of your data is done (those files that are partly stored in bad sectors), but the SSD can be brought back to a fully usable state. I've been using my affected SSD for over 10 months now and the original bad sectors have been remapped with good ones, as well as no new ones developing (probably thanks to the firmware update). Of course, i don't fully trust this SSD anymore, and i shall RMA it eventually, but the SSD can recover from the problem.



This is good to know. Then I will do the firmware update and hope for the best I suppose. I reached out to Samsung Memory Services and they're telling me it's from a bad SATA cable. Which doesn't seem to reflect anything I've read here, it also doesn't really solve all the bad sectors I have on this thing. I may end up getting Crucial as a secondary and have this one be a back-up, especially if they try to give me the run around on getting an RMA.



> But once you get all your intact files off the drive and delete the couple affected files that can't be fully read out anymore, then the drive should remap the bad sectors and you will have the full capacity worth of good sectors again.



Is this as simple as copying everything over to another drive and then formatting this one? Sorry, this is my first real SSD so I'm in foreign territory.


----------



## 80251 (Oct 7, 2022)

Yeah Samsung it's all down to bad SATA cables.  All those people who reported premature Samsung 870 EVO failures (here and on newegg and on amazon) all have bad SATA cables -- as if an end user can't test for that independently.


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## Count von Schwalbe (Oct 7, 2022)

MEMANIAsama said:


> Is this as simple as copying everything over to another drive and then formatting this one? Sorry, this is my first real SSD so I'm in foreign territory.


Yup, same as any other drive. Make sure you update firmware before formatting and thank your lucky stars that the format table wasn't stored in a block that went bad.


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## CiTay (Oct 7, 2022)

MEMANIAsama said:


> Is this as simple as copying everything over to another drive and then formatting this one? Sorry, this is my first real SSD so I'm in foreign territory.



More or less. Copy everything over, and you will see that a couple files just can't be read out (i think i used FreeFileSync to keep track of them), those you will just have to delete later. Theoretically it's possible to save the intact parts of them, but i didn't bother, those files weren't so important (i have a backup of the important ones). When it's all said and done, the SSD should have remapped the bad sectors with good ones. Each SSD comes with a whole bunch of reserve sectors, because it's inevitable that a few sectors go bad (usually way later than here, because it tends to depend on the amount of times they've been written to). So when that remapping has been done, every last Byte of space can be written to and read from normally again. I literally filled my drive up to the last Byte several times, and so far, no broken files. Still leaves a sour taste in your mouth and i won't put anything important on there.


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## E.S (Oct 7, 2022)

RMA probably won't fix the problem.

Maybe Just replace it with the new firmware 870evo.
The new firmware has a problem with increasing SMART ID "FC".
And there is a possibility that the value that should be counted with SMART ID "05" (the number of reassigned sectors) is replaced with SMART ID "FC" to deceive.


----------



## CiTay (Oct 8, 2022)

E.S said:


> And there is a possibility that the value that should be counted with SMART ID "05" (the number of reassigned sectors) is replaced with SMART ID "FC" to deceive.



We will watch that value, but even if it had something to do with bad sectors, it wouldn't be too relevant to the end user, as long as the files stored on the drive never get affected. If the drive can prevent that intelligently, and prevent it for the whole guaranteed TBW or more (most SSDs can write almost twice their TBW before any drive failures) as well as 5+ years, then it would behave exactly as expected and everyone would be happy.


----------



## MEMANIAsama (Oct 8, 2022)

E.S said:


> RMA probably won't fix the problem.



Right but at least I can start with a "fresh" slate with firmware setup at the start, and I'm owed one. Still, not a bad time to get that Crucial 2TB, certainly not getting a 2nd Samsung as I originally intended. Screw 'em.


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## E.S (Oct 8, 2022)

CiTay said:


> We will watch that value, but even if it had something to do with bad sectors, it wouldn't be too relevant to the end user, as long as the files stored on the drive never get affected. If the drive can prevent that intelligently, and prevent it for the whole guaranteed TBW or more (most SSDs can write almost twice their TBW before any drive failures) as well as 5+ years, then it would behave exactly as expected and everyone would be happy.


SMART ID "05" (the number of reallocated sector count) is important. Increasing this is a big problem. Because it is the bad sectors that are relocated.
Also, the relocation area is limited, and when it runs out, it's lifespan.


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## Watermelon5 (Oct 8, 2022)

This explains a lot. Someone brought a very expensive Alienware laptop to me a few months ago with two of these in RAID. Both were totally dead. Apparently it just happened overnight. Production date was right in the middle of this range.


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## 80251 (Oct 8, 2022)

8 months of silence from Samsung on what is obviously a systemic problem.


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## disenter (Oct 8, 2022)

I think it's not limited to 2Tb & 4Tb versions. I have a 870 EVO 1tb that has died as well. My nas wouldn't touch it, SMART info shows uncorrectable error count at 249 where 99 is max, and ECC error also showing the same number, and marking both 'critical'. I was able to repartition it, and it will accept a 'quick' format, but fails a long format, and doesn't want to be written to at all.  Only bought it August '21, and manufactured January 2021.
I've sent in to Samsung about it, but can't seem to find anywhere to register it. Hopefully the proof of purchase, and export of smart data from Samsung Magician is enough for them to replace it!


----------



## E.S (Oct 8, 2022)

The date of manufacture probably doesn't matter.
The problem occurs with old firmware.
Also, the new firmware has another problem as mentioned above.


----------



## Fry178 (Oct 9, 2022)

@CiTay
<1 does not equal 0, and its still a consumer product, no matter what reliability it has/had,
so i will never bet on its "life", even if it was a drive with zero fails.
we dont even know (iirc) what the cause is, might be a part that isnt even made by samsung.

my important data is backed up (3 times), everything else is a pain in the butt to get but will just take time to dl/copy etc,
so my only issue would be the time it takes for rma and have a new drive back,
major reason i preferred OCZ and Crucial drives in the past (offering to ship new drive right away),
and why i will never go past 1TB for nand, less data to lose/recover.

as example: Porsche is the most reliable sports car maker, its products costing multiple factors more than this,
yet i will never assume it will be a 100% reliable.


----------



## CiTay (Oct 9, 2022)

Fry178 said:


> we dont even know (iirc) what the cause is, might be a part that isnt even made by samsung.



Samsung has full vertical integration, so there isn't a part that doesn't come from Samsung, i mean the NAND and controller and firmware are all Samsung.

Anyway, i've already posted why i expected better from Samsung.
Yes, one Porsche can also fail. But you certainly wouldn't expect them to launch a new model and after a year there are failures all around the world, with no word from Porsche about it. So...


----------



## Rottmeisterest (Oct 13, 2022)

So I bought new 870 Evo 1tb (made July 2022), when testing with Samsung magician, it immediately gives me ,,Failing LBA" message on the upper corner, although s.m.a.r.t is completely clean with no errors, it also passes short-and full scan wo issues, CrystalDisk shows no problems either.
Not sure whats goin on here...


----------



## E.S (Oct 13, 2022)

The date of manufacture probably doesn't matter.
There seems to be a problem with older firmware.
Also, new firmware has a new problem of increasing SMART ID "FC".
Isn't "FC" counting relocated bad blocks? I have a suspicion that


----------



## Rottmeisterest (Oct 13, 2022)

E.S said:


> The date of manufacture probably doesn't matter.
> There seems to be a high probability that the problem will occur after 2000 to 5000 hours with the old firmware.
> Also, new firmware has a new problem of increasing SMART ID "FC".
> Isn't "FC" counting relocated bad blocks? I have a suspicion that



It has the latest firmware and it threw Failed LBAS straight out of box


----------



## 80251 (Oct 14, 2022)

I was going to buy the 4 TiB EVO until I read this thread then I went with the much slower 4 TiB QVO.


----------



## Joe Bauers (Oct 14, 2022)

Oh, no... I have 2 of 2Tb 870 EVO (((


----------



## Gungar (Oct 14, 2022)

I have no problems with my 4tb 870 evo, bought last year.


----------



## 80251 (Oct 14, 2022)

Is the 4 TiB model of the Samsung 870 EVO immune to these failure issues?


----------



## CiTay (Oct 14, 2022)

80251 said:


> Is the 4 TiB model of the Samsung 870 EVO immune to these failure issues?



No, just look at the screenshot in the first post, that's one of my three 4TB ones (the other ones have no bad/reallocated sectors so far).


----------



## E.S (Oct 14, 2022)

80251 said:


> Is the 4 TiB model of the Samsung 870 EVO immune to these failure issues?



Why are you asking such a question now?
you should know the answer.

I can't talk about the new firmware and the SMART ID "FC" problem, which is important, because it's been replaced by a trivial topic.
Are people here not interested in new firmware issues? 
I think that it is strange.


----------



## tonster76 (Oct 15, 2022)

Just google Samsung EVO failure, and landed here.
Mines a 2TB failed after less than a year, not even a primary drive.  Jan 2021


----------



## E.S (Oct 15, 2022)

There may be a lot of people on this forum who want to dismiss the problem with the new firmware.
Samsung employee?


----------



## ThrashZone (Oct 15, 2022)

Hi,
Think most have skipped 870 series except some bold that did qvo's instead 
I believe the whole 870 series should be recalled personally.

Funny some say new samsung magician should report and bad ssd hell has anyone shown SM doing this ?
I have my doubts


----------



## puma99dk| (Oct 15, 2022)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> Think most have skipped 870 series except some bold that did qvo's instead
> I believe the whole 870 series should be recalled personally.
> 
> ...



I am wondering if the 870 will be the last SATA SSD series from Samsung but personally I am hoping to see 880 and 890 because there is still a use for good an realiable SSD's because Samsung's SATA SSD's are maybe the best their NVME's I am not happy with.


----------



## ThrashZone (Oct 15, 2022)

puma99dk| said:


> I am wondering if the 870 will be the last SATA SSD series from Samsung but personally I am hoping to see 880 and 890 because there is still a use for good an realiable SSD's because Samsung's SATA SSD's are maybe the best their NVME's I am not happy with.


Hi,
I definitely will never be in any hurry to buy another sammy ssd that isn't labeled Pro.


----------



## puma99dk| (Oct 15, 2022)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> I definitely will never be in any hurry to buy another sammy ssd that isn't labeled Pro.



I don't want to pay for something named "Pro" I only got my Windows 8 Pro because it was cheap upgraded it from because I had a bunch of XP Pro licenses I had when I was trying to take an education so I got the XP Pro's for next to nothing and the 8 Pro cost me like £60 or something it should been a upgrade version but it's a Retail so I don't complain not sure what happened but never complained.

I always use the evo they are enough for most people and I can recommend 840, 850 and 860 those their the once i personally had and never had one of them fail.


----------



## ThrashZone (Oct 15, 2022)

puma99dk| said:


> I don't want to pay for something named "Pro" I only got my Windows 8 Pro because it was cheap upgraded it from because I had a bunch of XP Pro licenses I had when I was trying to take an education so I got the XP Pro's for next to nothing and the 8 Pro cost me like £60 or something it should been a upgrade version but it's a Retail so I don't complain not sure what happened but never complained.
> 
> I always use the evo they are enough for most people and I can recommend 840, 850 and 860 those their the once i personally had and never had one of them fail.


Hi,
Yep I have some 850/ 860's around
Pro versions would be for os not storage for obvious price issues


----------



## Pwnstix (Oct 15, 2022)

I posted about 6 months ago about my 4TB 870 EVO with failing uncorrectable error counts and ECC error rates, which Samsung replaced for me. My replacement still seems to be doing okay; I check SMART regularly to look for any failures.


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## E.S (Oct 17, 2022)

Pwnstix said:


> I posted about 6 months ago about my 4TB 870 EVO with failing uncorrectable error counts and ECC error rates, which Samsung replaced for me. My replacement still seems to be doing okay; I check SMART regularly to look for any failures.


The uncorrectable error counts and ECC error rates issue has been fixed with new firmware "SVT02B6Q".
but "SVT02B6Q” has a new problem: the value of SMART ID "FC" keeps increasing.
This may indicate a retired bad block.
If so that's a big problem.
This is because spare blocks are limited.


----------



## Zeromis (Oct 17, 2022)

E.S said:


> The uncorrectable error counts and ECC error rates issue has been fixed with new firmware "SVT02B6Q".
> but "SVT02B6Q” has a new problem: the value of SMART ID "FC" keeps increasing.
> This may indicate a retired bad block.
> If so that's a big problem.
> This is because spare blocks are limited.


What is FC even meant to represent though. The field didn't even appear in the first place till installing that firmware for me. It was also already high in the first place for me too on the drive that I couldn't RMA (but fully formatted to use as a drive for non-essential data). Since then it's gone up by 49. None of the other fields have gone up at all though, the runtime bad block count and ECC error rate is the exact same value as it was before I installed the firmware and wiped the drive.

The replacement drive I got back for the one I could RMA only has a value of 1 in that field, it's been written to more in that time frame(105 days) than the old one too.


----------



## kevin335200 (Oct 18, 2022)

I have collected some of the serial numbers that are affected in the link below (not only 870 EVO, it actually impacts wide range of SSD models which are manifactured in 2021):
https://www.chiphell.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=2443478
I have included a translation from DeepL at the end.

for 870 EVO: S5Y3NF0R / S621NG0R / S62BNJ0(R?) / S62CNF0R / S62CNJ0R / S6BANJ0R / S6BCNG0R

Feel free to share first nine digits of your affected SSD's serial number, I have decoded that it contains specific model, capacity, year / month of production and where it's manifactured, which can help people determine the batches that are affected.

TLDR: It usually happened when the Total Host Writes ≈ 10TB, most affected SSDs are manifactured in 2021 (so the eighth digit is mainly R), but there still exists a few cases in 2020 (i.e. the eighth digit is N) and January 2022 (i.e. the eighth digit is T, the ninth digit is 1)

Because it involves several models and different generations of controllers, e.g. PM9A1 has reports with the factory firmware ending with 7401Q / 7601Q and various OEM firmware batches, what I can tell is that there is little correlation with the controller and firmware.


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## CiTay (Oct 18, 2022)

My affected 4TB: S6BCNG0R
My unaffected 4TB: S6BCNS0R + S6BCNJ0R

I also have a 980 PRO with S5GXNF0R, which is listed in your thread. So far i've only seen this problem be common with the 870 EVO, are you now saying it can affect all those models you list?


----------



## E.S (Oct 18, 2022)

My 870 serial is not on the list and I've had problems writing 1TB.

The date of manufacture probably doesn't matter.
The reason why the 22-year manufacturing does not cause any problems is because the firmware is new.
It's the firmware that matters, not the manufacturing date.
Also, new firmware has a new problem of increasing SMART ID "FC".


----------



## kevin335200 (Oct 18, 2022)

CiTay said:


> My affected 4TB: S6BCNG0R
> My unaffected 4TB: S6BCNS0R + S6BCNJ0R
> 
> I also have a 980 PRO with S5GXNF0R, which is listed in your thread. So far i've only seen this problem be common with the 870 EVO, are you now saying it can affect all those models you list?


Yes, sadly  Models that I listed have reported at least one screenshot from CDI or Samsung Magician
If your 980 PRO has not been affected, you may have been lucky (obviously, only a small portion of the total shipments are affected), or you may just not have used it long enough...
S5GXNF0R has been reported in the 4th page of this thread: https://www.chiphell.com/forum.php?mod=redirect&goto=findpost&ptid=2443478&pid=50686727








E.S said:


> My 870 serial is not on the list and I've had problems writing 1TB.
> 
> The date of manufacture probably doesn't matter.
> The reason why the 22-year manufacturing does not cause any problems is because the firmware is new.
> ...



Not sure about 870 EVO, but PM9A1 that manifactured in 2022Q1 is still affected:





Source: https://www.chiphell.com/thread-2435363-1-1.html


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## CiTay (Oct 18, 2022)

Why didn't they set the raw values to DEC in the screenshots? In HEX it's much harder to read. I even wrote the author of CrystalDiskInfo to make DEC values the default, but he seems to like HEX more... 

So on the 980 PRO you are supposed to look for a non-zero ID 0E value then? Just one case of it doesn't convince me that the 980 PRO is affected. Ony 870 EVO we see a lot of cases.


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## kevin335200 (Oct 18, 2022)

CiTay said:


> Why didn't they set the raw values to DEC in the screenshots? In HEX it's much harder to read. I even wrote the author of CrystalDiskInfo to make DEC values the default, but he seems to like HEX more...
> 
> So on the 980 PRO you are supposed to look for a non-zero ID 0E value then? Just one case of it doesn't convince me that the 980 PRO is affected. Ony 870 EVO we see a lot of cases.


Of course it isn't just one case... Otherwise I don't have to spend this much time and effort to collect them on the Internet

Several 980 PRO examples with other serial numbers:

S69ENG0R:





S69ENF0R, before and after upgrading the firmware:





S6B0NG0R, 03 is also running out:





I don't feel the need to post more screenshots, after all, this post is still about the 870 EVO. If that still doesn't convince you, I can start a separate thread to post all the screenshots that I have collected.


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## CiTay (Oct 18, 2022)

Yeah, fair enough, i'm convinced. I'm easy to convince with facts, don't worry


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## E.S (Oct 19, 2022)

> Zeromis said:
> 
> What is FC even meant to represent though.


SMART ID "FC" (252) is described on wikipedia as follows:

252
0xFC*Newly Added Bad Flash Block*The Newly Added Bad Flash Block attribute indicates the total number of bad flash blocks the drive detected since it was first initialized in manufacturing.[81]
Given this explanation, increasing this value seems like a problem.
I've been using the 870evo for over a year now and the "FC" value has been increasing recently.


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## JagCube (Oct 20, 2022)

Since 0xFC / 252 is officially a "vendor specific" attribute, are there really any guarantees it means exactly the same thing on these current Samsung drives with the new firmware, as somebody somewhere on the Internet years ago determined it means on their possibly not even Samsung drive?

Not to defend Samsung or anything. I bought a 1TB 870 EVO myself a little less than a year ago which it seems I now need to return and hope for a non-defective replacement, and an eventual refund if the replacement turns out to have the same problem.


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## E.S (Oct 20, 2022)

JagCube said:


> Since 0xFC / 252 is officially a "vendor specific" attribute, are there really any guarantees it means exactly the same thing on these current Samsung drives with the new firmware, as somebody somewhere on the Internet years ago determined it means on their possibly not even Samsung drive?
> 
> Not to defend Samsung or anything. I bought a 1TB 870 EVO myself a little less than a year ago which it seems I now need to return and hope for a non-defective replacement, and an eventual refund if the replacement turns out to have the same problem.


Samsung has not explained anything about this big problem.
that's abnormal.
We should suspect Samsung as much as possible.


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## JagCube (Oct 20, 2022)

E.S said:


> Samsung has not explained anything about this big problem.



Yes, that would certainly be appreciated. Also them telling what exactly 0xFC means and providing a changelog for the firmware would be very, very nice.



E.S said:


> We should suspect Samsung as much as possible.



However, if you check the SMART attribute descriptions used by CrystalDiskInfo you can already find an alternate description for attribute 0xFC (see under the various SmartMicron headings):

"FC=Total NAND Read Plane Count (High 4Bytes)"

It seems my old 512 GB Intel-branded SSD in one of my PCs also reports a 0xFC SMART attribute which is currently at 0x22 (34 dec) which I have no idea what it might be, and whether it was lower when the disk was new. It could even plausibly be a temperature value (34*°*C)*. *I can at least say I've never had any problems whatsoever with that disk, and all the error counters and reallocated sector count are still at zero after many years.


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## E.S (Oct 20, 2022)

Presumably　The update to firmware "SVT02B6Q" is intended to fix our problem.
The addition of "FC" is of course also relevant.
"Total NAND Read Plane Count" is irrelevant to this problem.
It would be reasonable to interpret it as "Newly Added Bad Flash Block"
I suspect that they are trying to avoid RMT by replacing fatal values SMART ID "05" (Reallocated Sector Count) and "183" (Runtime Bad Block) with "FC".


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## JagCube (Oct 20, 2022)

E.S said:


> Presumably　The update to firmware "SVT02B6Q" is intended to fix our problem.
> The addition of "FC" is of course also relevant.
> "Total NAND Read Plane Count" is irrelevant to this problem.
> It would be reasonable to interpret it as "Newly Added Bad Flash Block"
> I suspect that they are trying to avoid RMT by replacing fatal values SMART ID "05" (Reallocated Sector Count) and "183" (Runtime Bad Block) with "FC".



If the intention is to hide the existence of broken sectors from users, why have any externally visible counter for them at all? The drive could still internally keep track of them for remapping without ever telling the user anything about them. And why pick 0xFC for it when there's "prior art" of using this attribute number for a bad sector count?

They cannot hide the disks losing sectors forever anyway because eventually the user is going to notice that some files they stored earlier cannot be read anymore. Unless the new firmware just ignores uncorrectable read errors and returns garbage data in such a case? (I wouldn't know, I've not used it, my EVO came with the old firmware from factory and I never updated it)

I don't know how things would work out outside in countries with less legally mandated consumer protection, but I'm pretty sure that here I could get the drive exchanged or refunded regardless of any SMART counters if some tens to hundreds of sectors just become unreadable. Especially if the new firmware still stores uncorrectable read errors in the SMART log and fails the SMART self test on such unreadable sectors, but possibly even just an OS always reporting I/O errors when reading certain sectors could be enough.

edit: I am of course lucky enough to be in a situation where I can deal with the retailer (less than 2 years from purchase date). Probably things wouldn't go so well if I had to deal directly with Samsung.

I certainly hope if the retailer sends me another 870 EVO that if it's going to develop this problem, it'll develop it before the 2 years are up so I can just ask them instead of Samsung for a refund.

btw. here are the details of my broken 1TB EVO:
 - Manufactured 2021.07
 - Made in China
 - PN MZ7L31T0HBLB
 - Model MZ-77E1T0
 - Factory firmware SVT01B6Q
 - Serial S6PUNF0R[...]


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## E.S (Oct 20, 2022)

JagCube said:


> If the intention is to hide the existence of broken sectors from users, why have any externally visible counter for them at all? The drive could still internally keep track of them for remapping without ever telling the user anything about them. And why pick 0xFC for it when there's "prior art" of using this attribute number for a bad sector count?


I don't know.
Maybe samsung wants the data.
The 870evo is Samsung's first 1xxL 3D TLC NAND. You may want to collect data using users as test subjects.
Also, most people don't really care about the "FC" value.
In fact, no one on any forum pointed out that "FC" is "Newly Added Bad Flash Block" until I pointed it out here.
There was no one.


----------



## CiTay (Oct 20, 2022)

Now it gets a bit weird, are you suggesting that Samsung is receiving all SMART data as telemetry over the internet or something? 

Yes, you are the only one repeatedly claiming that FC is related to new bad blocks. Sadly, an unproven claim doesn't become more well-founded by repeating it a lot.

I don't want to exclude the possibility that this FC value means something negative going on internally. But i would actually have to see that become reality for someone, it really preceding a failure with actual bad sectors on the drive. That's the point where i would become worried about the FC value. Otherwise, it could mean whatever.

The other day i installed a Verbatim Vi550 S3 SSD in someone's old notebook. I'm not exaggerating, it had like 30+ SMART IDs/values, and only a handful had a description, all the rest were vendor specific!


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## E.S (Oct 20, 2022)

JagCube said:


> They cannot hide the disks losing sectors forever anyway because eventually the user is going to notice that some files they stored earlier cannot be read anymore.


It may be Reallocated before it becomes unreadable, and then retired as a bad block.



CiTay said:


> Sadly, an unproven claim doesn't become more well-founded by repeating it a lot.


You said that early batch was the cause without any evidence.
It has led many users in the wrong direction.
Although samsung may be pleased.


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## CiTay (Oct 20, 2022)

E.S said:


> You said that early batch was the cause without any evidence.
> It has led many users in the wrong direction.



It was the best information i had at the time, according to the cases i saw. I would very much like to edit my first post for various reasons, but the forum doesn't allow it.


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## Daytrader (Oct 25, 2022)

I got this problem on 2 of my Samsung 870 4TB SSD, made date feb 21 and sept 21, made in korea, trying to get rma accepted, nightmare proof they need.
​


----------



## Captain Danger (Oct 28, 2022)

kevin335200 said:


> TLDR: It usually happened when the Total Host Writes ≈ 10TB, most affected SSDs are manifactured in 2021 (so the eighth digit is mainly R), but there still exists a few cases in 2020 (i.e. the eighth digit is N) and January 2022 (i.e. the eighth digit is T, the ninth digit is 1)


Do you have any data as to when it crossed 10 TB and failed, how many of them were from each capacity? (250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB.)


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## Mussels (Oct 29, 2022)

CiTay said:


> It was the best information i had at the time, according to the cases i saw. I would very much like to edit my first post for various reasons, but the forum doesn't allow it.


If you report your own post you can ask for permissions to be altered to allow edits


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## Tomgang (Oct 29, 2022)

Aw, I just buying such a drive today. Now I'm not sure if I should return it.

Any one knows if this issue has been fixed or still effect ssd produced later?


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## kevin335200 (Oct 29, 2022)

Captain Danger said:


> Do you have any data as to when it crossed 10 TB and failed, how many of them were from each capacity? (250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB.)


This speculation comes from the observation of a large number of CDI screenshots, I do not yet have spare time to create a sheet for accurate statistics, but in general I don't feel a strong correlation with the capacity (almost all of the screenshots are somewhere between 7T - 15T). As well, the expression around 10T is not really precise, it is only an approximate confidence interval from my observation. I feel like it could be a little bit higher, but no more than 15T.

Also, this is only the data when the user found the problem and does not represent the amount when the failure started.


----------



## Daytrader (Oct 29, 2022)

kevin335200 said:


> This speculation comes from the observation of a large number of CDI screenshots, I do not yet have spare time to create a sheet for accurate statistics, but in general I don't feel a strong correlation with the capacity (almost all of the screenshots are somewhere between 7T - 15T). As well, the expression around 10T is not really precise, it is only an approximate confidence interval from my observation. I feel like it could be a little bit higher, but no more than 15T.
> 
> Also, this is only the data when the user found the problem and does not represent the amount when the failure started.


This is on only 2021 ssd's, or are the 2022 ssd's still have this problem ? thx


----------



## kevin335200 (Oct 29, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> This is on only 2021 ssd's, or are the 2022 ssd's still have this problem ? thx


I have only collected 1 case from January 2022 so far, so it could be outlier. After this time point the problem might have been solved, however, Samsung does not have any official statement yet. Only time will tell.


----------



## ThrashZone (Oct 29, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> This is on only 2021 ssd's, or are the 2022 ssd's still have this problem ? thx


Hi,
Avoid 870 evo.


----------



## P4-630 (Oct 29, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> This is on only 2021 ssd's, or are the 2022 ssd's still have this problem ? thx


You could get an 860 evo instead.


----------



## Daytrader (Oct 29, 2022)

kevin335200 said:


> I have only collected 1 case from January 2022 so far, so it could be outlier. After this time point the problem might have been solved, however, Samsung does not have any official statement yet. Only time will tell.


Thx, i have one other 870 4TB dated sept 2021, only just started using, like 3TB written to it so far, i reckon this will go bad also, also made in korea like others, i got accepted to rma others, but sent all info via link they give you, and says they contact you within 1 to 2 days, already been 3 days and nothing, is this normal ? thx



ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> Avoid 870 evo.


Yeh i might, or go with a different make all together, thx



P4-630 said:


> You could get an 860 evo instead.


Yeh i will look into them, i have a 850 that is 7 years old and my main ssd, and not one error on that, thx


----------



## E.S (Oct 30, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> This is on only 2021 ssd's, or are the 2022 ssd's still have this problem ? thx


Please read my past posts.
2022 ssd's have new firmware.
There is another issue with this new firmware, which is an increase in the SMART ID "FC" value.
"FC" is a value related to bad blocks according to wikipedia, so increasing this value may be a problem.
Perhaps even the new firmware doesn't fundamentally fix the problem.



kevin335200 said:


> I have only collected 1 case from January 2022 so far, so it could be outlier. After this time point the problem might have been solved, however, Samsung does not have any official statement yet. Only time will tell.


why are you ignoring my past posts?
The problem is probably not resolved.


----------



## Daytrader (Oct 30, 2022)

E.S said:


> Please read my past posts.
> 2022 ssd's have new firmware.
> There is another issue with this new firmware, which is an increase in the SMART ID "FC" value.
> "FC" is a value related to bad blocks according to wikipedia, so increasing this value may be a problem.
> ...


Oh, i did not realise the problem was the firmware, thought it was the drives themselves, my 09 2021 drive i have only just started using, with latest firmware, so you saying that 09 2021 drive will hopefully be ok ? thx


----------



## parityerror (Oct 31, 2022)

I bought 4 pcs of 870 EVO 1 TB in June 2021.  The first one failed now with about 3 TB written, can no longer read some of the files on the disk, there are bad blocks and lots of read errors in the smart report.  Disk manufacture date is 2021.01.

I don't have any windows machines, so I can't use the Samsung tool to update the firmware of my remaining drives.  I found some instructions for downloading and extracting the Samsung fumagician software, but it just crashes on my machine.  The firmware file (SVT02B6Q.enc) was included with fumagician, but the linux fwupdmgr command doesn't understand the file format.

Is there a way of updating the SSD firmware on linux - one that actually works?

I will post here if I manage to update the fw...  Samsung sure isn't making this easy.


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## E.S (Oct 31, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> Oh, i did not realise the problem was the firmware, thought it was the drives themselves, my 09 2021 drive i have only just started using, with latest firmware, so you saying that 09 2021 drive will hopefully be ok ? thx


The root cause of the problem may lie in the drive itself.
The new firmware may appear to fix the problem at first glance, but it may actually be just masking the problem.
We have to note the newly added SMART ID "FC".


----------



## Daytrader (Oct 31, 2022)

What replacement ssd do people recommend, or are 2022 samsungs ok you reckon ? thx


----------



## 80251 (Nov 1, 2022)

E.S said:


> The root cause of the problem may lie in the drive itself.
> The new firmware may appear to fix the problem at first glance, but it may actually be just masking the problem.
> We have to note the newly added SMART ID "FC".


What's interesting about your observation is that none of my 850 Pro SSD's (I have three of them) or my 870 QVO have a FC SMART ID statistic


----------



## Captain Danger (Nov 1, 2022)

parityerror said:


> I bought 4 pcs of 870 EVO 1 TB in June 2021.  The first one failed now with about 3 TB written, can no longer read some of the files on the disk, there are bad blocks and lots of read errors in the smart report.  Disk manufacture date is 2021.01.


Power On Hours for the failed drive?


----------



## parityerror (Nov 1, 2022)

Captain Danger said:


> Power On Hours for the failed drive?


9031 hours at the moment. Can't say when the disk failed, it's only one large file that is unreadable at the moment and I hadn't been accessing it recently.


----------



## parityerror (Nov 2, 2022)

I finally managed to update the firmware on two disks using fumagician.  The reason it was crashing before was that when it scanned the disks in the system, it found an SD card reader with no disk in it (I found this out by tracing the program).  In the meantime, I also tried Samsung_SSD_DC_Toolkit_for_Linux_V2.1.exe which recognized the disks, but didn't want to update them (saying "[ERROR] The SSD connected does not have a valid update in the given firmware files.").  It doesn't officially support consumer drives, but I was desperate enough to try it anyway.
So, I will RMA the failed disk and hope that after the update, the others will work reliably.

After the update, here's some info of the two disks.  Whatever the attribute 252 is, the value is strangely high on the less used disk:



> `ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
> 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
> 9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       11292
> 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       45
> ...





> `ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
> 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
> 9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1468
> 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       20
> ...


----------



## Daytrader (Nov 2, 2022)

So has anyone that have rma there bad 870 ssd, ever got a new one back, or are they just refurbished ssd's ? thx


----------



## 80251 (Nov 2, 2022)

@parityerror, the 252 SMART value is the FC value mentioned by E.S.


----------



## parityerror (Nov 3, 2022)

Thanks, yes, but it seems we don't know for sure what that value actually means (if we should be worried about it increasing or not).


----------



## E.S (Nov 5, 2022)

I have posted in the past.
People on this forum don't read my posts at all.


SMART ID "FC" (252) is described on wikipedia as follows:


252
0xFC*Newly Added Bad Flash Block*The Newly Added Bad Flash Block attribute indicates the total number of bad flash blocks the drive detected since it was first initialized in manufacturing.[81]


----------



## parityerror (Nov 5, 2022)

E.S said:


> I have posted in the past.
> People on this forum don't read my posts at all.
> 
> 
> ...


I have read the whole thread including your messages, but there was some disagreement about the meaning of this smart parameter..


----------



## 80251 (Nov 5, 2022)

Is Samsung still manufacturing 870 EVO's? Or have the moved on to 970 EVO's? This whole thread has made me paranoid about my 870 QVO 4 TiB.


----------



## E.S (Nov 6, 2022)

parityerror said:


> Thanks, yes, but it seems we don't know for sure what that value actually means (if we should be worried about it increasing or not).


With all these conditions, why do you think there is no need to worry?
That's a little unusual.

1, SMART ID "FC" is an item related to this issue because it was added by updating the firmware.
2, According to wikipedia, SMART ID "FC" is explained as Newly Added Bad Flash Block, and its value continues to increase during use.
3, Samsung doesn't explain anything. (If the problem is solved, you should say it's solved)


As far as I read on wikipedia, I think that SMART ID "FC" (252) is originally an item representing the initial bad block.

What worries me is the possibility of trying to cover up the problem by counting bad blocks acquired during use as early bad blocks.


----------



## Daytrader (Nov 6, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> So has anyone that have rma there bad 870 ssd, ever got a new one back, or are they just refurbished ssd's ? thx


Anyone ?


----------



## ThrashZone (Nov 6, 2022)

Hi,
If they send back a refurbished it will state it on the ssd label.
Crucial does this not sure what sammy does though.

Best to contact sammy directly.


----------



## Daytrader (Nov 6, 2022)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> If they send back a refurbished it will state it on the ssd label.
> Crucial does this not sure what sammy does though.
> 
> Best to contact sammy directly.


Ok thx for reply.


----------



## Mussels (Nov 7, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> Anyone ?


If you ask and no one answers, that means no


Theres maybe 20 people here of the 8 billion in the world, it's not somewhere you're gunna get random people answer that question


----------



## ThrashZone (Nov 7, 2022)

Hi,
lol 
No, it's not a new one sent back using rma
No, it's not a refurbished one sent back using rma
Did I get that right if nobody responds


----------



## Daytrader (Nov 7, 2022)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> lol
> No, it's not a new one sent back using rma
> No, it's not a refurbished one sent back using rma
> Did I get that right if nobody responds


Thx for reply


----------



## ThrashZone (Nov 7, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> Thx for reply


Hi,
Thankfully I've not had to rma any sammy ssd's yet
Pretty sure it can likely be a refurbished and what ever warranty time is left is continued as it started with the original 

Not to say refurbished is bad I still have a crucial still kicking 4 years after getting a refurbished replacement linux killed so don't let that detail get you down.

But that is a good question


----------



## Daytrader (Nov 7, 2022)

I asked because, how would they even be able to refurbish a ssd in the first place, its not mechanical so no moving parts to go wrong, so they should only offer brand new, but i have read other places they did get a refurb of the same year ssd that are the problem.


----------



## ThrashZone (Nov 7, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> I asked because, how would they even be able to refurbish a ssd in the first place, its not mechanical so no moving parts to go wrong, so they should only offer brand new, but i have read other places they did get a refurb of the same year ssd that are the problem.


Hi,
I'd say that would be the exception if it's hardware failure
In my crucial case it was a firmware issue so they just cleaned and reloaded the firmware
Sammy's to I've read they sent out firmware updates to solve the issue, not sure if it does or not, not many have returned with update details sadly.


----------



## R0Sch (Nov 11, 2022)

Another one bites the dust! 
*SSD 870 EVO 1TB, made in China date 05.2021, firmware SVT01B6Q used exactly 1 year with only 4.5 TBW* is having 265 bad blocks, read/write errors (can't fully backup data or install new games any more) and after each scan increasing ECC Error Rate / Uncrorrectable Error Count. Crystal Disk Info shows it's health at 77% and Disk Sentinel already at 57%. Sent the info's to Samsung for RMA start.
Here are the S.M.A.R.T data before/after Full Diagnostic Scan and the full scan results

I'm really worried about having the same drive and capacity in another device where it's an OS main drive. That one is from 04.2021, but the S.M.A.R.T values are ok since I only used it for 280h and 2.3 TBW.


----------



## Mussels (Nov 13, 2022)

R0Sch said:


> Another one bites the dust!
> *SSD 870 EVO 1TB, made in China date 05.2021, firmware SVT01B6Q used exactly 1 year with only 4.5 TBW* is having 265 bad blocks, read/write errors (can't fully backup data or install new games any more) and after each scan increasing ECC Error Rate / Uncrorrectable Error Count. Crystal Disk Info shows it's health at 77% and Disk Sentinel already at 57%. Sent the info's to Samsung for RMA start.
> Here are the S.M.A.R.T data before/after Full Diagnostic Scan and the full scan results
> 
> I'm really worried about having the same drive and capacity in another device where it's an OS main drive. That one is from 04.2021, but the S.M.A.R.T values are ok since I only used it for 280h and 2.3 TBW.


Can you confirm TRIM is running on your OS?

In a cmd prompt:


> fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify



If you get a result of zero (0), then it means that TRIM is enabled

If it's a 1, then run 


> fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0


It's about the only thing i can think of that could accelerate such an issue


----------



## R0Sch (Nov 13, 2022)

Mussels said:


> Can you confirm TRIM is running on your OS?
> 
> It's about the only thing i can think of that could accelerate such an issue


Yes, I can confirm TRIM is enabled. It's not the only SSD in my PC. The other ones (Crucial M4 and C300) are much older are still showing 0 bad blocks and 0 reallocated sectors after 25000 hours of usage. I use my SSD's only for games and downloads.

The only thing I could think of is maybe there's a weird incompatibility with the Marvell SATA III controller (X58 Sabertooth) and Samsung SSD's in particular. My 870 Evo was shown as "this drive is not supported" in Samsung Magician until I switched it to a Sata II port, just to be able to get the SMART and diagnostic results for their RMA. My M4 did not develop such issues albeit being connected to the other SATA III port.

Wonder if I should format the drive and update to the latest firmware SVT02B6Q and keep using it as another user suggested. The damage is there so it would only mask the problem and probably reduce the drives total capacity. The bad blocks would be excluded from usable space, right?


----------



## Mussels (Nov 13, 2022)

Googling says x58 supports TRIM just fine, except it wont work in RAID

Was that extra controller in a RAID mode?


----------



## R0Sch (Nov 13, 2022)

Mussels said:


> Googling says x58 supports TRIM just fine, except it wont work in RAID
> 
> Was that extra controller in a RAID mode?


No and I never used RAID on my drives. Bios is set to AHCI.


----------



## Mussels (Nov 13, 2022)

That should be fine, was just worth checking

I've seen a lot of people run their controllers in RAID mode despite not actually having any RAID arrays - just because the drivers wouldnt install in AHCI mode (because they're RAID drivers, not AHCI drivers)


----------



## yollamamama (Nov 15, 2022)

Seems my drive randomly stopped working completely today without warning. I have a 2TB 870 EVO from 03/2021 SN: S620NG0R....  It isn't even being picked up by my BIOS even after cable swapping and drive swapping with a known good one. Is there anything I can do to recover my data? If I send it in is there a chance it can be repaired so I can recover my data if I can't do it myself?


----------



## R0Sch (Nov 15, 2022)

yollamamama said:


> Seems my drive randomly stopped working completely today without warning. I have a 2TB 870 EVO from 03/2021 SN: S620NG0R....  It isn't even being picked up by my BIOS even after cable swapping and drive swapping with a known good one. Is there anything I can do to recover my data? If I send it in is there a chance it can be repaired so I can recover my data if I can't do it myself?


Sounds like something on your SSD PCB got fried. Reminds me of this video troubleshoot:









Samsung wipes all drives during RMA for data security purpose. So no chance even if repaired. They explicitly write "we don't provide data recovery services".


----------



## Mussels (Nov 16, 2022)

yollamamama said:


> Seems my drive randomly stopped working completely today without warning. I have a 2TB 870 EVO from 03/2021 SN: S620NG0R....  It isn't even being picked up by my BIOS even after cable swapping and drive swapping with a known good one. Is there anything I can do to recover my data? If I send it in is there a chance it can be repaired so I can recover my data if I can't do it myself?


no


important data should never be stored in one location


----------



## floogulinc (Nov 25, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> So has anyone that have rma there bad 870 ssd, ever got a new one back, or are they just refurbished ssd's ? thx


I RMAed 3 drives and got 2 new retail box. One in a white "not for retail sale" box. They all seem to be new.


----------



## Daytrader (Nov 25, 2022)

floogulinc said:


> I RMAed 3 drives and got 2 new retail box. One in a white "not for retail sale" box. They all seem to be new.


Nice, yeh i had a brand new in box sent to me, dated sept 2022.


----------



## R0Sch (Nov 26, 2022)

I also received yesterday a new one back, manufactured in 2022-07-14. It also has the newest firmware SVT02B6Q on. Fingers crossed.


----------



## E.S (Nov 30, 2022)

According to samsun's firmware update page,
The 870evo seems to have been manufactured in a new process since November 2022.
Was the problem caused by the manufacturing process?










						Samsung Magician & SSD Tools & Software Update | Samsung Semiconductor Global
					

Download Samsung Magician, tools & software for Samsung SSDs, Data Migration Software, Firmware, Driver, Data Center Toolkit, Activation Software.




					semiconductor.samsung.com
				



Samsung SSD Firmware (40)​*The 870 EVO model will be manufactured with a revised V6 process starting November 2022.


----------



## R0Sch (Nov 30, 2022)

That is very interesting indeed. Might be.


----------



## E.S (Dec 5, 2022)

some poeple say bad blocks are caused by the linux kernel.
Is it true?






						201693 – Samsung 860 EVO NCQ Issue with AMD SATA Controller
					






					bugzilla.kernel.org


----------



## ThrashZone (Dec 5, 2022)

E.S said:


> some poeple say bad blocks are caused by the linux kernel.
> Is it true?
> 
> 
> ...


Hi,
No telling 
Linux killed one of my crucial mx100's ssd a while back because of a firmware incompatibility so I wouldn't be quick to rule linux out.


----------



## Potomac (Dec 5, 2022)

Hello,

I have a 870 EVO 500 GB bought in February 2021 (production date : January 2021), and my OS is archlinux.
The firmware shipped with this SSD is SVT01B6Q.

5 days ago I noticed that smartmontools reported me 31 reallocated sectors, and the short and long self tests don't succeed,
a very small amount of files was corrupted because of these bad sectors.

After google search I found this thread, and I followed advices like flashing firmware to the last version (SVT02B6Q), no improvements, smart tests (short and long) still fail. and bad sectors increased to 41.

Then I decided to run "Samsung magician tool" on a windows PC, a full diagnostic scan :






Then I decided to do a "secure erase" of the SSD (I have already backup data on another SSD), because some users (like the author of this thread, Citay) managed to recover the SSD by simply erasing all the data (low level format, or better : the "secure erase" sata command), and it worked 

Short and long smart tests works now after the full erase, and Samsung Magician doesn't find bad sectors when I redo a full scan :





Smart data still show reallocated sectors and uncorrectable errors count, but these values don't increase anymore since the update of the firmware :





I don't know if I have to do a RMA, the SSD seems to work fine despite these 41 reallocated sectors, perhaps it was mainly a firmware bug, and the new firmware manage to avoid new bad sectors ?
The SSD has a very low usage (only 1.6 TB written since february 2021).

What do you think ?
Should I RMA this SSD ? I am not very fond of refurbished SSD that Samsung usually send...


----------



## ThrashZone (Dec 5, 2022)

Hi,
Not sure magician ever found anything wrong 
Crystaldiskinfo did








						Downloading File /78047/CrystalDiskInfo8_17_13.exe - CrystalDiskInfo - OSDN
					

Free download page for Project CrystalDiskInfo's CrystalDiskInfo8_17_13.exe.CrystalDisklnfo is disk utility that supports some types of USB connections, Intel RAID, and NVMe.  If anything abnor...



					osdn.net


----------



## Potomac (Dec 5, 2022)

I tested also Crystaldiskinfo, and the software shows 99% health, and no warning/error messages.

Short and self smart tests are made internally by the SSD (softwares like CrystalDiskInfo, Smartmontools and Magician only read the results reported by the SSD),
a diagnostic scan (reading all LBA sectors) is a good test for tracking bad sectors,

Forcing the SSD to remap bad sector has chances to succeed (full erase), but it doesn't mean than the surviving flash memory cells are in good shape,
however no new bad sectors 3 months after the full erase may be a good sign.

I will try to stress/benchmark the SSD (copy files, reinstalling OS), if new bad sectors occur then I will do a RMA.


----------



## 80251 (Dec 5, 2022)

@Potomac
I wouldn't just be worried about reallocated sectors with your SSD I'd be worried about the ECC Error Rate and Uncorrectable Error Count as well.


----------



## Potomac (Dec 5, 2022)

Yes of course.

The ECC error rate and number of uncorrectable errors increased because I ran diagnostic tools and smart self-test too often,
when it hits one of the bad sectors (red mark on the Samsung Magician graph) : the counters go crazy as the SSD tries to read the bad sector several times before giving up.

Once these bad sectors were remapped (with the help of "secure erase" sata command), the ECC error rate and the number of uncorrectable errors stopped increasing.


----------



## 80251 (Dec 6, 2022)

Depending on how long the warranty is I'd still consider RMA'ing that EVO 870. Why get burned?


----------



## Potomac (Dec 6, 2022)

You probably right,

I have started RMA procedure, I have just sent to them by email screen captures, invoice and photos,
not sure if the RMA will be accepted, because if they try to check the SSD with their software then they will notice that Samsung Magician reports no errors for the diagnostic scan (because of the secure erase I made), they will just notice the SMART errors (41 reallocated sectors,  16749 uncorrectable error count and 16749 ECC error rate).

I will try to benchmark the SSD before send it, perhaps another bad sectors will occur after copying big files.


----------



## 64K (Dec 6, 2022)

Is this still an issue or has it been sorted out now?


----------



## Potomac (Dec 6, 2022)

Some production of 870 EVO SSD (250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB and 4 TB) made between the end of 2020 and september 2021 may have the problem,

the symptoms are :

- SSD works without problems for 6 or 18 months, and suddenly the user notices errors during SMART self tests, and some unreadable sectors, increase of reallocated sector count value, and often corrupt files.
- Despite of a moderate usage of the SSD (1.6 TB of data written for example) the reallocated sector count value increases (40, 60 or even more).
- A secure erase (or write zeros) may allow the SSD to pass SMART self tests (short and long version), with Samsung Magician software showing no errors during the diagnostic scan, without being sure of the lifespan of the SSD, it can at any time create again corrupted files.

We don't know if the new firmware (SVT02B6Q) can reduce the risk, or if samsung has improved quality control and used better quality memory chips for 870 EVO SSDs made after september 2021,
I think the risk is still here for the 870 EVO series.


----------



## 80251 (Dec 6, 2022)

I'll never buy a Samsung 870 EVO and I don't really trust my 870 QVO anymore either.


----------



## Potomac (Dec 9, 2022)

The SSD was just picked up by DHL for RMA, now I have to wait for it to be received by Samsung.

I hope everything will go well, this SSD has bad SMART infos (reallocated sector count, uncorrectable error count, ECC error rate), but bad sectors are no longer visible during a surface scan (since I made a secure erase), I don't know if Samsung will do a surface scan when they receive SSD for RMA, or if they just check SMART infos.


----------



## ThrashZone (Dec 9, 2022)

64K said:


> Is this still an issue or has it been sorted out now?


Hi,
870's are cursed so no I think sammy is just kicks the ball down the road with rma replacements 
They'll likely still have future issues with 870's but the warranty does not start over it continues from when original purchase date.


----------



## Potomac (Dec 9, 2022)

Perhaps it's time for Samsung to end 870 series, it must be 2 years since 870 was launched on the market.

880 EVO models, with new quality control process, better flash memory modules, may help to restore confidence for customers.


----------



## FISHTACO (Dec 10, 2022)

Anyone know if this batch of 870 Evo are effected with issues? (MZ-77E2T0B/AM) https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B08QB93S6R/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1


----------



## Potomac (Dec 10, 2022)

It's like casino games, you may win, you may lose,
only Samsung knows the real reliability of current 870 EVO SSDs production (quality control process, flash memory modules, quality of the controller, of the firmware).

There is a risk, some amazon customers had problems :



> Started to Fail Within Months
> Reviewed in Canada on September 1, 2022
> Capacity : 1TBVerified Purchase
> 
> ...



You still have 5 years warranty, possibility of quick RMA if things go bad.

If you want 100% reliability : buy pro series from Samsung, but it's more expensive.
And I suggest no to store important data on 870 EVO SSD, just put the OS, programs, games, things you can easily reinstall if the SSD crashes,

And use a HDD for storing important data (better for data archiving than SSDs), RAID systems can be also a good strategy.


----------



## chrcoluk (Dec 10, 2022)

Some thoughts, I wonder if anyone with failures has volume shadow copy enabled? The recent discovery in my thread that when thats enabled Microsoft might defrag the SSD automatically.


----------



## kapone32 (Dec 10, 2022)

Potomac said:


> It's like casino games, you may win, you may lose,
> only Samsung knows the real reliability of current 870 EVO SSDs production (quality control process, flash memory modules, quality of the controller, of the firmware).
> 
> There is a risk, some amazon customers had problems :
> ...


Or just buy a different budget drive from a "premium" brand.



chrcoluk said:


> Some thoughts, I wonder if anyone with failures has volume shadow copy enabled? The recent discovery in my thread that when thats enabled Microsoft might defrag the SSD automatically.


I can't believe that this thread is from January. Samsung seem to suffer from the same issue OCZ and Corsair 1st Gen drives suffered from or those thumb drives from Kingston. It is obvious that they are either using unstable NAND or the controller is poorly insulated. I would never buy one of these. Give me a 660P from Intel (much maligned) every day before I would get one of these drives.


----------



## Daytrader (Dec 10, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> Some thoughts, I wonder if anyone with failures has volume shadow copy enabled? The recent discovery in my thread that when thats enabled Microsoft might defrag the SSD automatically.


Well 99.9% of people will be using system restore in windows, so i doubt that has anything to do with it ?


----------



## chrcoluk (Dec 11, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> Well 99.9% of people will be using system restore in windows, so i doubt that has anything to do with it ?


It wouldnt be the root cause but might accelerate the failure state?

I think by default Win10 and Win11 have SR off now.


----------



## Daytrader (Dec 11, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> It wouldnt be the root cause but might accelerate the failure state?
> 
> I think by default Win10 and Win11 have SR off now.


Did not know that, my system been going with system restore on since 2015, when i built my PC, did not know it was disabled by default now, thx


----------



## chrcoluk (Dec 11, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> Did not know that, my system been going with system restore on since 2015, when i built my PC, did not know it was disabled by default now, thx


Well double check as I am not 100% sure, but I kind of remember having to turn it on manually on Win10.  If it is on by default, it will only be for the C: drive, as it was only ever on by default for the OS drive only.


----------



## Daytrader (Dec 11, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> Well double check as I am not 100% sure, but I kind of remember having to turn it on manually on Win10.  If it is on by default, it will only be for the C: drive, as it was only ever on by default for the OS drive only.


Yeh good point, my two 4TB ssd's were both not os drives, so would not matter to me anyway, and still failed..


----------



## Mussels (Dec 11, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> Some thoughts, I wonder if anyone with failures has volume shadow copy enabled? The recent discovery in my thread that when thats enabled Microsoft might defrag the SSD automatically.


And what thread was that?

While individual files may get defragged, thats not the same as the entire drive

system restore is on by default, but only on the C: Drive and it's not write heavy - it's almost the opposite (same as shadow copies)
What they do is an NTFS feature where a new file of the same name doesnt over-write the old one, it goes to free space instead, and the old ones are marked as a 'can be deleted, but use empty space first'

So if space is needed they're removed and used, but if not your shadow copy/SR is available from the last time it was written - it was made invisible, not actually deleted


----------



## chrcoluk (Dec 11, 2022)

It may be a partial defrag but still a defrag, I did measure the writes during the defrag process, and posted it in the thread.
Read it carefully.  I watched it carefully, it did multiple free space consolidation passes, and was about 20 minutes of fairly heavy writing.  I posted the exact measured writes taken from SMART in the thread.









						Windows keeps defragging one of my SSDs
					

This started since last windows update, screenshot attached, note it has correctly identified the SSD, so doesnt think its a spindle.  All my other SSDs only trim, this one is doing an actual defrag.  I keep stopping it but then it keeps starting again, unless I kill the defrag service.  If I...




					www.techpowerup.com


----------



## Mussels (Dec 12, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> It may be a partial defrag but still a defrag, I did measure the writes during the defrag process, and posted it in the thread.
> Read it carefully.  I watched it carefully, it did multiple free space consolidation passes, and was about 20 minutes of fairly heavy writing.  I posted the exact measured writes taken from SMART in the thread.
> 
> 
> ...


replied in the thread


----------



## mplayerMuPDF (Dec 12, 2022)

kapone32 said:


> Or just buy a different budget drive from a "premium" brand.
> 
> 
> I can't believe that this thread is from January. Samsung seem to suffer from the same issue OCZ and Corsair 1st Gen drives suffered from or those thumb drives from Kingston. It is obvious that they are either using unstable NAND or the controller is poorly insulated. I would never buy one of these. Give me a 660P from Intel (much maligned) every day before I would get one of these drives.


It is sad how far Samsung SSDs have fallen. The 860 Evo is such a good drive. I have three of them, two of which I bought myself, one 500GB 2.5" in the laptop I am typing this one, one 2.5" 250 GB I was gifted that is in my Llano ProBook and an M.2 250 GB that is in a damaged laptop that I have been trying to sell but I will probably salvage it from that computer and use it in a new system that I will commission later this month. That said, I will never buy a (post-870 Evo) Samsung SSD again after this disaster and kudos to the TPU community for exposing this.

I actually for some years thought that Kingston was awesome as as a kid I had one of their DataTraveler (USB 2.0) drives (containing the only copy of a big homework assignment) and it survived a journey in the washing machine, which saved my little ass. However, lately I have read some less than great stories about them.

Anyway, for SSDs I now prefer Crucial/Micron and Sandisk and I am not afraid to buy used ones (from non-sketchy sellers, of course). I don't need the latest and greatest and am happy to reduce the amount of e-waste. I would never consider all the exotic brands; I see no reason to gamble on them. SK Hynix is also blacklisted for me as they don't seem to deal well with power loss at all, which is a big no no for me.


----------



## 80251 (Dec 12, 2022)

@mplayerMuPDF 
Have you had any SK Hynix SSD's fail? I bought their 1 TiB P31 M.2 SSD which has held up fine so far (fingers crossed).


----------



## mplayerMuPDF (Dec 13, 2022)

80251 said:


> @mplayerMuPDF
> Have you had any SK Hynix SSD's fail? I bought their 1 TiB P31 M.2 SSD which has held up fine so far (fingers crossed).


I have never owned an SK Hynix SSD but I was referring to https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sk-hynix-sabrent-rocket-ssds-data-loss


----------



## DZMBA (Dec 14, 2022)

A few days ago I came across a comment on reddit mentioning this issue, & I have four 2TB Samsung 870 Evos, two purchased in Feb & two in June.  So I looked....
At the time I hadn't notice anything off yet, but apparently the batch from Feb had been blowing up the error logs for several months now. It wasn't until I actually tried getting data off them did the "_Can't read from source file or disk_" & "_Cyclic Redundancy Check_" user facing errors start.

The first image is what I posted in that reddit thread just 5 days ago.  Those error rates will jump up quite a bit as I try to get data off.  The second shows my current situation after diving in.  I offloaded nearly all the data I could from the storage pool, but I still don't have enough redundancy to handle a double failure occurring in my largest drives, that are Samsung no less!  I replaced old Crucial M4s that I thought weren't as reliable but were nothing but reliable for 7-8yrs. Samsung.... I don't know what to say. And I have 2 more of them that are just 2 months away from 7 months since purchase!







Here is the current state.






Manufactured October & November of 2021


----------



## Daytrader (Dec 14, 2022)

Your shipped feb 2022 drive, what date was made ?


----------



## chewie198 (Dec 14, 2022)

DZMBA said:


> A few days ago I came across a comment on reddit mentioning this issue, & I have four 2TB Samsung 870 Evos, two purchased in Feb & two in June.  So I looked....
> At the time I hadn't notice anything off yet, but apparently the batch from Feb had been blowing up the error logs for several months now. It wasn't until I actually tried getting data off them did the "_Can't read from source file or disk_" & "_Cyclic Redundancy Check_" user facing errors start.
> 
> The first image is what I posted in that reddit thread just 5 days ago.  Those error rates will jump up quite a bit as I try to get data off.  The second shows my current situation after diving in.  I offloaded nearly all the data I could from the storage pool, but I still don't have enough redundancy to handle a double failure occurring in my largest drives, that are Samsung no less!  I replaced old Crucial M4s that I thought weren't as reliable but were nothing but reliable for 7-8yrs. Samsung.... I don't know what to say. And I have 2 more of them that are just 2 months away from 7 months since purchase!
> ...


I'm in the same boat, I have six 4TB drives running on a TrueNAS SCALE RAID-Z2 pool with triple redundancy, but the errors have become so prolific that I've nearly lost the pool a few times. It took me a while to discover that the problem was actually the drives too - there were so many failures that I assumed something spanning all of the drives like the software, controller, cabling, or power delivery must have failed and so I wasted some time troubleshooting the wrong issues. Fortunately simply re-reading from the drive usually seems to allow it to quickly re-silver with no lost data, and this is for a small business with multiple pool backups, but it's pretty frustrating to end up with potential downtime here because so many of the drives are failing and it happened all at once across nearly all the drives. Out of six drives, two were manufactured mid-2021 and two were from January of this year, and at least one of the drives from this year is also failing. As soon as I can pull the drives out of the server I'll check which firmware they're running. I suspect that the faulty SVT01B6Q firmware was still being used in January at least, which leaves me with potentially 6 RMAs to deal with while hoping the remainder doesn't just self-destruct while waiting for the replacements. I have to say, this is potentially one of the worst failure modes I've seen on any storage drive, not just Samsung, because it has the potential to render multiple layers of server redundancy moot when you have entire clusters of drives failing simultaneously.


----------



## shovenose (Dec 14, 2022)

Yeah the fact that it starts with silent corruption vs just failure is concerning. At least with ZFS you should be safe.


----------



## Daytrader (Dec 14, 2022)

Hope someone has passed on this thread to Samsung ?


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## 80251 (Dec 14, 2022)

@Daytrader
The whole idea that Samsung isn't aware of the failures that are happening across their entire 870 EVO series doesn't seem believable. There are plenty of reviews of 870 EVO's on newegg and amazon that mention these catastrophic failures.

It would be nice if Samsung would:
a. own up to the problems with their 870 EVO series
b. stop manufacturing said SSD's and/or recall the entire series

@chewie198 
Those 4 TiB 870 EVO's aren't cheap either. What a clusterf*%k.


----------



## Daytrader (Dec 14, 2022)

80251 said:


> @Daytrader
> The whole idea that Samsung isn't aware of the failures that are happening across their entire 870 EVO series doesn't seem believable. There are plenty of reviews of 870 EVO's on newegg and amazon that mention these catastrophic failures.
> 
> It would be nice if Samsung would:
> ...


yup i paid almost £700 for my two


----------



## mplayerMuPDF (Dec 14, 2022)

80251 said:


> @Daytrader
> The whole idea that Samsung isn't aware of the failures that are happening across their entire 870 EVO series doesn't seem believable. There are plenty of reviews of 870 EVO's on newegg and amazon that mention these catastrophic failures.
> 
> It would be nice if Samsung would:
> ...


I mean, Samsung overall is quite a shady company so with that in mind it is perhaps not too surprising. Best thing we consumers can do is spread the word and recommend buying from solid brands that use solid components (and for me personally that also means no Phison controller, at the very least for SATA drives). There are so many good options out there today: Crucial/Micron, Intel, Sandisk, WD (personally not a great fan of them in general) and HP. I consider ADATA to be questionable and I don't know why you would go with brands like Corsair, Mushkin, PNY, Sabrent, Kingston etc. when you have the options above but if you want to gamble or are a megafan of one those brands, be my guest.


----------



## DZMBA (Dec 14, 2022)

Daytrader said:


> Your shipped feb 2022 drive, what date was made ?


I finally got the drives pulled after sacrificing all movies, games, & downloads (had to delete the volume stuck on "_not enough redundancy remaining to repair the virtual disk_" to successfully complete the "_Preparing for Removal_").

(I've already registered the drives so not too sure it matters if I show the serials)

S6PNNJ0RB17997K was manufactured *2021.11* (November 2021).  This is the really bad one.
S620NJ0RA04653P was manufactured *2021.10* (October 2021)


I'm currently running tests on just the *2021.10*.  SAMSUNG Magician isn't able to recognize the drives through the LSI SAS controller.   Which is a huge pain, my PC is stuffed in a hidden area wedged behind the desk and wall, so digging into it  requires moving everything & re-organizing cables.
Well, while moving the drives to the motherboard controller, the SATA cable to the *2021.11* must not have got plugged in all the way. I was shoving cables blind not wanting to _also _remove the GPU or HDD cage.   So it looks like I'm only testing one at a time.  

As of now, I've  tested the *2021.10* (the better one),* & no issues have been found!?? * It's passed every test SAMSUNG Magician has to offer. I've even avoided updating the firmware bcus I wanted to see if doing it would change the behavior.   The Reallocated Sector Count did not increase, but Uncorrectable Errors did from 71 to 166.  I've since filled the drive with my backup data, and plan to later test if I can read it back & compare it bit-by-bit without issue.







UPDATE:  That one SATA cable is just bad I guess and they're seemingly both passing.  I've only done the short tests for the 2021.11 one.  Got a few more hours left on the full scan but I expected it to instantly blow up.


----------



## Daytrader (Dec 14, 2022)

On my bad drive, i could not copy alot of the data to another drive, so i knew they were bad, i had alot of uncorrectable error count, like 10698, rma accepted straight away.


----------



## Ociya Syndor (Dec 14, 2022)

RJARRRPCGP said:


> This reminds me of Maxtor Diamond Max 8 HDDs, (the slim models, the ones that look skinnier than the usual 3.5-inch sizing) which are failure prone. (The ones that are mainly model code 6Exxxxx)
> 
> While Diamond Max 9, IIRC, before Seagate bought Maxtor, were reliable. (ones with model code 6Yxxxxx were solid, OTOH)


yep! those & DeathStars


----------



## chrcoluk (Dec 15, 2022)

80251 said:


> @Daytrader
> The whole idea that Samsung isn't aware of the failures that are happening across their entire 870 EVO series doesn't seem believable. There are plenty of reviews of 870 EVO's on newegg and amazon that mention these catastrophic failures.
> 
> It would be nice if Samsung would:
> ...


It needs a reviewer to draw attention to it, if they lose review samples for a couple of years so be it, this thread is on the TPU website, I wonder if someone with a defective SSD would accept sending their SSD if it meant getting media coverage, if I remember right, thats what triggered Samsung's acceptance of the 840 drives been broken after pcper covered it.

On a spindle once you get even 1 reallocated sector, you know its toast, research how they happen on spindles and can understand why, but not sure how these failures tend to work on SSDs in terms of the growth of defective sectors, but the only time I have seen the errors stop rising of their own accord is when they were not caused by the drive, such as bad SATA cable or memory errors.


----------



## Mussels (Dec 15, 2022)

These drives will have revisions and different internals
They can have a variety of flash memory and controllers with revisions, but could also be made in different factories or countries

Of the screenshots on the last page for example, they have a bunch of various numbers - some are a little fuzzy but:

The PN "product name" is the same
the model is the same
The SN (serial number) is obviously different
WWN is the same until near the end - they both have 5002538F31 but then differ - is this a batch code? revisions?
PSID is totally different after first digit





If you can find any other differences between them from any programs, it'll be interesting what they are

If you ever end up opening them physical inspection would be fascinating too, for all we know it's like the covid GPU's and we'll find fingernails gloves and bandaids instead of thermal pads


----------



## DZMBA (Dec 15, 2022)

Mussels said:


> Of the screenshots on the last page for example, they have a bunch of various numbers - some are a little fuzzy but:



Here's a clearer picture with the entire gang, if it helps.
I would open, take pictures, and inspect the internals, but the sticker states "`Warranty void if label removed or case opened.`".  However, there's a law that states these stickers are unenforceable and completely illegal thanks to the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975.  
[Warranty-Voiding Stickers Are Illegal. | iFixit News]   
But I don't want to have to jump through hoops or argue with them to get them to honor their warranty when I RMA eventually.
If someone knows this won't be a problem, then I'd be happy to open them up and take pictures to post here. 






  Both drives passed all Samsung Magician tests.  But it does identify CRITICAL smart issues, even though they pass the SMART tests just fine.






---------------------------
UPDATE:

I've been running the drives through a gauntlet but the error counters haven't increased since fully wiping and formatting them.  Makes me wonder if there's some kind of bit rot going on with infrequently accessed data. When I moved the files off originally, it did seem like all the CRC errors occurred with older files.
Since no new errors were happening, I decided to finally upgrade the firmware to SVT02B6Q and figured maybe I'll add one back to the pool and see what happens.  But after the upgrade and before adding it to the pool, SAMSUNG Magician is finally saying "*Failing LBA*" and an error counter has increased, Though, a different one this time, CRC Error Count from 0 to now 4.

I can't quite figure out how to file a warranty claim. I thought maybe Magician would suggest something at this point.  The website just runs me in circles and always leads me to the Download page for Magician - which is why I thought I needed it to report "*Failing LBA*" to get anywhere.  
1. The "Request Service",  "Schedule a Repair", & "Get Support" buttons for my registered products randomly shuffle around, and for products that are still in warranty, the "Request Service" &  "Schedule a Repair" buttons never appear and it only presents the "Get Support" button.
2. Clicking the "Get Support" button takes you to "Recommended solutions", but only presents you with one option, "Get Information -> Get Started".
3. Clicking "Get Started" takes you to the Download page for Samsung Magician.


----------



## chewie198 (Dec 15, 2022)

I was able to pull some of my drives from the server today and found that the two drives manufactured in Jan 22 were already running the SVT02B6Q firmware, so Samsung must have started applying this from the factory in November or December. Nonetheless, the SMART characteristics from those drives were still reporting some CRC errors, although everything else error-related was at zero. TrueNAS had also been reporting errors on one of them as well, so I might need to do a little more digging on those two to figure out what's happening there. The one drive I managed to test from July 21 is displaying the expected set of SMART errors and high error counts, so I'll likely end up RMA'ing that batch of four from July 21 to start and proceeding from there. Has anyone had a RMA replacement or firmware-updated drive in service long enough to verify whether the problem has indeed been resolved? I'm curious whether anyone has had a drive last over 12 months without issue yet.


----------



## 80251 (Dec 15, 2022)

It would be interesting to find out just what the problem is with the 870 EVO series. Does it have a unique controller that is only used by the 870 EVO series? Is the V-NAND used unique to only the 870 EVO series? Unfortunately I get the feeling no one outside of Samsung's engineering and senior management will ever know.


----------



## Mussels (Dec 16, 2022)

Samsung will just shrug and say that's what warranties are for and for hardware revisions, these drives have no guarantees of no data loss and they'd just tell you to make backups


----------



## chewie198 (Dec 16, 2022)

It appears that the CRC errors I was seeing on the SVT02B6Q firmware may be due to buggy support for queued TRIM under Linux. According to https://www.phoronix.com/news/Samsung-860-870-More-Quirks, the 5.15 kernel blacklists that function on these drives, so I'll have to wait until I can update my TrueNAS-SCALE system to the 22.12.1 release to test that theory. Just another fun bug to deal with on these drives in the meantime.


----------



## Mussels (Dec 16, 2022)

If you guys are running linux based OS's (the comments indicate several of you are) that might explain a lot of this, especially since they say it's worst for linux users with AMD chipsets


statistics would say most people are running them on intel chipsets in windows, and explain why they fail commonly for some people but not for others


----------



## Potomac (Dec 16, 2022)

I received a SSD 870 EVO 500 GB replacement for the RMA I made last week,

I don't know if it's a refurbished SSD, it comes with a sealed package, like a new SSD,

production date : 2022-11-22, made in Vietnam
firmware : SVT02B6Q

SMART infos (the serial number is intentionally hidden) :





It seems a new SSD, no LBAs written, just "4" for the value of power on count, and "2" for "POR Recovery Count",

Do you think it's a new SSD or a refurbished SSD ?


----------



## chewie198 (Dec 16, 2022)

Potomac said:


> I received a SSD 870 EVO 500 GB replacement for the RMA I made last week,
> 
> I don't know if it's a refurbished SSD, it comes with a sealed package, like a new SSD,
> 
> ...


Well with a Power-on Hours count of 0 and 0 LBA's written, and a manufacturing date less of last month, that's about as new as you can get.  The non-zero power-on count might just be due to factory testing of the drive, but even if it's not, what difference would it make, practically speaking? If it were me I wouldn't be concerned about that unless it was showing other signs of use or throwing errors. Not to mention that it would be difficult, albeit not impossible, for Samsung to receive a failed drive, refurbish it, and send it back out in under a month unless they're either falsifying the manufacturing dates or simply zeroing out the error counts, replacing the label, and sending old drives back out. Not saying that I have evidence one way or the other, but no one thus far has suggested that anything nefarious is going on with the replacement process, only that the original firmware seems to have major issues.



Mussels said:


> If you guys are running linux based OS's (the comments indicate several of you are) that might explain a lot of this, especially since they say it's worst for linux users with AMD chipsets
> 
> 
> statistics would say most people are running them on intel chipsets in windows, and explain why they fail commonly for some people but not for others


I think there are two separate issues here and they appear to be mostly unrelated, and I say that for several reasons. First, the drive failures indicated by the URE and ECC errors seem to be happening universally across both Windows and Linux, and in every case that I've seen have happened on drives manufactured prior to Dec 2021 running the SVT01B6Q firmware.

Second, the queued trim issues manifest as SMART CRC errors, while the URE and ECC counts remain at zero. This is the case on both of my drives running the updated SVT02B6Q firmware. Supposedly this only happens on Linux kernels prior to 5.15, although I haven't had a chance to verify that 5.15 resolves this issue. Lastly, there may be even worse performance and reliability issues associated with NCQ support on AMD SATA controllers under Linux, and kernel 5.15 supposedly resolves that as well. In my case, however, while these drives are running in an AMD EPYC server, they're all connected to LSI SAS HBAs which are pretty much the industry standard for NAS HBAs and do not appear to be affected by NCQ issues. Once I've had a chance to update to 5.15 and have either RMA'd or updated all of my 2021 drives I'll try to provide a follow up if that resolves the issue. Ideally it'd be nice to get some feedback from someone who's been running the latest firmware release for at least 6-12 months to see if there any residual long-term issues or if the problems have been completely resolved.

One positive observation I have regarding the SVT02B6Q firmware was that I was able to take a failed 4TB drive, updated the firmware first, then ran a full diagnostic scan. Despite finding hundreds of errors, the recovery process was able to complete successfully. If I'm able to resilver these drives into the ZRAID pool successfully and can run them error-free while I repair/RMA the remainder, that would be an indicator that this may be primarily a firmware issue. In which case the RMA process may be simply a way to zero the SMART error counts and clear out any bad block mappings (or maybe the firmware update takes care of that itself). Just speculating here.


----------



## Daytrader (Dec 16, 2022)

Potomac said:


> I received a SSD 870 EVO 500 GB replacement for the RMA I made last week,
> 
> I don't know if it's a refurbished SSD, it comes with a sealed package, like a new SSD,
> 
> ...


Mine came sealed and looked brand new, i think they are new myself as the date manufactured suggests.


----------



## floogulinc (Dec 16, 2022)

DZMBA said:


> A few days ago I came across a comment on reddit mentioning this issue, & I have four 2TB Samsung 870 Evos, two purchased in Feb & two in June.  So I looked....
> At the time I hadn't notice anything off yet, but apparently the batch from Feb had been blowing up the error logs for several months now. It wasn't until I actually tried getting data off them did the "_Can't read from source file or disk_" & "_Cyclic Redundancy Check_" user facing errors start.
> 
> The first image is what I posted in that reddit thread just 5 days ago.  Those error rates will jump up quite a bit as I try to get data off.  The second shows my current situation after diving in.  I offloaded nearly all the data I could from the storage pool, but I still don't have enough redundancy to handle a double failure occurring in my largest drives, that are Samsung no less!  I replaced old Crucial M4s that I thought weren't as reliable but were nothing but reliable for 7-8yrs. Samsung.... I don't know what to say. And I have 2 more of them that are just 2 months away from 7 months since purchase!
> ...


My suggestion would be to just copy everything off that pool onto completely separate storage. Then you can just destroy the pool and make a new one without the bad drives. Windows should be able to recover most of all bad blocks when copying data off, or at least that's what happened with my storage spaces mirror of 3 870 evos.


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## Mussels (Dec 17, 2022)

Warranty drives will always be new drives, they cant DO a repair to an SSD


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## Potomac (Dec 18, 2022)

Not sure for 870 EVO series, I saw this message on reddit, he received a refurbished SSD for 860 EVO series :


__
		https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/rlmr5k


----------



## Bandi (Dec 18, 2022)

First I had an 840 Evo, that had serious issues until Samsung fixed it with a firmware update.
Then I had an 970 Evo NVMe, that only works error-free on my AMD system with a special driver from Samsung.
Lastly I bought an 970 EVO, instead of the cheaper QVO, because I finally wanted a fast and reliable drive. And now this. I am sick of Samsung at this point.


----------



## kevin335200 (Dec 18, 2022)

E.S said:


> SMART ID "FC" (252) is described on wikipedia as follows:
> 
> 252
> 0xFC*Newly Added Bad Flash Block*The Newly Added Bad Flash Block attribute indicates the total number of bad flash blocks the drive detected since it was first initialized in manufacturing.[81]
> ...


I may have found what "FC", also ID 252 actually means for Samsung SSD: Read ECC Count
Source: PM863a datasheet


----------



## DZMBA (Dec 19, 2022)

kevin335200 said:


> I may have found what "FC", also ID 252 actually means for Samsung SSD: Read ECC Count
> Source: PM863a datasheet



I sure hope not. 
That attribute is new as of SVT02B6Q firmware.  My 2 "Good" 870Evos manufactured 2022.04 that came with SVT02B6Q both have a value of 1 there. The 2 bad 870Evos that I flashed to SVT02B6Q the other day show zero there, but perhaps it wasn't being tracked before.


----------



## E.S (Dec 19, 2022)

kevin335200 said:


> I may have found what "FC", also ID 252 actually means for Samsung SSD: Read ECC Count
> Source: PM863a datasheet




Thanks for the information.
If it's really ECC counts instead of bad blocks then I'm a bit relieved.


----------



## kevin335200 (Dec 19, 2022)

E.S said:


> https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/2213316.pdf
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Although not as bad as the bad block, this count is still problematic and it could still contain UECC.
If you do some Google search, you can find someone has uploaded PM9A3 firmware including its release note, which includes a situation that interval read may cause UECC.
Of course DC-class SSD firmware is much more complex than consumer-class, it may not be the same issue, but at least it shows that firmware defects can lead to read interference.
I will not put the link directly because it is confidental, just like the datasheet above, but it's easy to google it for now.



DZMBA said:


> I sure hope not.
> That attribute is new as of SVT02B6Q firmware.  My 2 "Good" 870Evos manufactured 2022.04 that came with SVT02B6Q both have a value of 1 there. The 2 bad 870Evos that I flashed to SVT02B6Q the other day show zero there, but perhaps it wasn't being tracked before.


Although I don't have an 870 EVO to verify, based on its relatively small value, I think it should have been uncounted in previous firmware versions.


----------



## E.S (Dec 19, 2022)

I'm worried if it's UECC.
If there is UECC, will that block be retired and consume spare blocks?


----------



## chrcoluk (Dec 19, 2022)

Bandi said:


> First I had an 840 Evo, that had serious issues until Samsung fixed it with a firmware update.
> Then I had an 970 Evo NVMe, that only works error-free on my AMD system with a special driver from Samsung.
> Lastly I bought an 970 EVO, instead of the cheaper QVO, because I finally wanted a fast and reliable drive. And now this. I am sick of Samsung at this point.
> 
> View attachment 274917


Samsungs silence has them on the path to junk vendor for me.  3 Skus with major issues, 2 of them only acknowledged after pcper put on media pressure, silence on this once, no one wants to lose their review samples, press access etc.


----------



## kevin335200 (Dec 19, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> Samsungs silence has them on the path to junk vendor for me.  3 Skus with major issues, 2 of them only acknowledged after pcper put on media pressure, silence on this once, no one wants to lose their review samples, press access etc.


At least there is still one key opinion leader who has cut through this issue from a data security perspective:
SSD in danger: Grinding down a Samsung 980 PRO 2TB until the RMA takes effect? Data security has priority! | igor'sLAB (igorslab.de)



E.S said:


> I'm worried if it's UECC.
> If there is UECC, will that block be retired and consume spare blocks?


It depends. If UECC is caused by read disturb, bit-flipping could be a non-permanent damage (e.g. the increased positive voltage during reading may interfere with the neighboring page, which can be eliminated), so after erasing, the block can be used again. Of course, if the ECC error rate of this block is very high (e.g. because the cell has low threshold voltage), the block may still be flagged because of threshold voltage degradation, which depends on the implementation of FTL in the firmware.


----------



## Mussels (Dec 20, 2022)

DZMBA said:


> I sure hope not.
> That attribute is new as of SVT02B6Q firmware.  My 2 "Good" 870Evos manufactured 2022.04 that came with SVT02B6Q both have a value of 1 there. The 2 bad 870Evos that I flashed to SVT02B6Q the other day show zero there, but perhaps it wasn't being tracked before.


ECC is a good thing, and far better than bad blocks


----------



## DeusExMachina (Saturday at 12:00 PM)

Unfortunately, I have similar experience with the EVO 870 4TB drives, with two failing consecutively. I used one as a backup drive but after a year started having issues. It was not clear to me then that it was the drive failing. I just saw intermittent device disconnection notifications on Windows but could not identify the cause. Then when I was upgrading to Windows 11, I noticed the 870 EVO kept disappearing/appearing on my Drives list. File transfers also kept getting interrupted or failing.

Incidentally I sent my system for repairs for other issues and the staff replaced the drive with another EVO 870 as it was identified as faulty. It's been less than a year since, and I wrote about 1 GB worth of data to the drive, but now it looks like it has issues too. Some files could not be moved nor opened. I ran Samsung Magician which said the drive was in "Good" health. The short scan ran fine, but the Smart tests kept failing/aborting with no recovery options. I tried firmware updates, but that also kept failing for the EVO. Did some Googling and it looks like the EVO 4TB has some bad batches.

I think my next replacement backup drive will be the Crucial MX500; rather not gamble on another EVO bad batch...


----------



## Daytrader (Saturday at 1:01 PM)

DeusExMachina said:


> Unfortunately, I have similar experience with the EVO 870 4TB drives, with two failing consecutively. I used one as a backup drive but after a year started having issues. It was not clear to me then that it was the drive failing. I just saw intermittent device disconnection notifications on Windows but could not identify the cause. Then when I was upgrading to Windows 11, I noticed the 870 EVO kept disappearing/appearing on my Drives list. File transfers also kept getting interrupted or failing.
> 
> Incidentally I sent my system for repairs for other issues and the staff replaced the drive with another EVO 870 as it was identified as faulty. It's been less than a year since, and I wrote about 1 GB worth of data to the drive, but now it looks like it has issues too. Some files could not be moved nor opened. I ran Samsung Magician which said the drive was in "Good" health. The short scan ran fine, but the Smart tests kept failing/aborting with no recovery options. I tried firmware updates, but that also kept failing for the EVO. Did some Googling and it looks like the EVO 4TB has some bad batches.
> 
> I think my next replacement backup drive will be the Crucial MX500; rather not gamble on another EVO bad batch...


I had 2 4TB drives go wrong, and dont even want to use the replacement 4TB drive they sent me back, even thou it was sept 2022 made.


----------



## Nuke Dukem (Sunday at 11:45 AM)

My brother in law just asked me about upgrading his laptop's storage and told me he had his eyes on a 1TB 870 EVO, so I immedeately thought of this thread and told him to wait. Just had a quick glance through the pages and from what I gathered certain 1TB drives fail as well. So I should probably tell him to get something else, just to be safe, right?


----------



## BioeJD (Sunday at 8:27 PM)

I've always bought Samsung, but just had my 2TB 870 EVO fail (manufactured Jan 15 2021in Korea, so admittedly lasted longer than others here) and am now uncertain about what to replace it with. 

Do I give Samsung another chance and hope a newly produced unit with up-to-date firmware is ok? Or do I switch to another brand? What do others recommend? I've always had good luck with WD HDDs but not much experience with their SSDs. Or SanDisk?

I guess I could grab another NVMe, but haven't decided whether it's worth it.


----------



## sonique (Monday at 6:07 PM)

anyone arrived back RMA 2tb evo drive ?
same problem ? or fixed ? 

first smart befor run magican full scan
and after


----------



## E.S (Tuesday at 12:47 AM)

I think that the source of this problem may be the same as the 840evo.
The 840evo bug is explained on the site below.
Read on to understand the problem with the 870evo.








						Samsung Releases Firmware Update to Fix the SSD 840 EVO Read Performance Bug
					






					www.anandtech.com
				



840evo seems Samsung has finally disclosed the details of the source the bug.
Will Samsung disclose what's causing the 870evo's problems?


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## SchumannFrequency (Tuesday at 12:46 PM)

Most modern file systems still show significant aging with performance loss, especially on newer storage technologies like SSDs. If SSDs or even faster devices are to be used to their full potential, additional solutions are required. Even when using several strategies to limit inter-file and intra-file fragmentation, current file systems often fail to achieve the physical locality required to retain performance in the long term. Even though these problems have been ignored in the past, there have been some promising current developments. At first glance BetrFS and ZFS seems to be largely immune to aging and thus merits further investigation. However, the windows10/11 NTFS and exFAT file systems are very susceptible to aging.


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## E.S (Tuesday at 2:36 PM)

SMART/SSD/Samsung/SSD 870 at master · linuxhw/SMART
					

Estimate reliability of desktop-class HDD/SSD drives - SMART/SSD/Samsung/SSD 870 at master · linuxhw/SMART




					github.com
				



You can see a lot of 870evo S.M.A.R.T data here.
Look at the updated data today.
A surprising number of SSDs have bad blocks.
If this data is true, it seems that a problem occurs with a surprisingly high probability.


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## bombadil (Today at 1:25 AM)

I have 3 Samsung Pro 2TB.
They say 97* Good / 100% Good / 99% Good
870 EVO 4TB Brand new is at 99% Good

No No error counts that I see, what else should I be looking for?

Also, odd Question, how did you guys get your Raw Value column to only show the #'s vs lots of 0's in front like mine? Couldn't find the option


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## E.S (Today at 2:18 PM)

Why are you asking a question unrelated to the 870evo issue?









						SMART/SSD/Samsung/SSD 870/SSD 870 EVO 4TB at master · linuxhw/SMART
					

Estimate reliability of desktop-class HDD/SSD drives - SMART/SSD/Samsung/SSD 870/SSD 870 EVO 4TB at master · linuxhw/SMART




					github.com
				



According to this data, 4TB has bad blocks in 2 out of 12.
are you not interested?


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## Ghan (Today at 5:34 PM)

bombadil said:


> I have 3 Samsung Pro 2TB.
> They say 97* Good / 100% Good / 99% Good
> 870 EVO 4TB Brand new is at 99% Good
> 
> ...



Function > Advanced Feature > Raw Values > 10 [DEC]





If you have anything but raw value "0" in the ones mentioned by the OP then you may have a affected SSD.


CiTay said:


> Check your 870 EVO SSDs for these things:
> Elevated "Reallocated Sector Count", "Used Reserve Block" and "Runtime Bad Block" count - first warning sign (my two other 870 EVOs have none).
> Non-zero "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate", and especially if those two keep rising when you read/write files. Definitely affected then!


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