Hi,
I've read all of this thread, which I discovered by accident.
A bit of background:
My Lenovo ThinkPad X201 (a refurbished device when I got it in mid-to-late 2015) has mostly happily chugged away with the Seagate 160GB drive it was supplied with. I did get get some bad blocks on that drive a while back and it had very occasionally been making worrying louder-than-usual clicking sounds of the kind you don't want to hear from a spinning drive! I'd been wanting to change it since the bad blocks as it was obviously on its way out, but had not had the opportunity until more recently, when it coincidentally started clicking a bit more frequently and so it became even more urgent to change it.
I got a USB <> SATA adapter to enable cloning the old drive to the new 870 EVO 250GB. Initially I got confused when I saw that fdisk and parted both showed a strange device ID and wondered if I'd bought a fake drive. I then searched to find info on this, but realised that what I was seeing was of course just the ID from the adapter, not the drive - doh! Checking with smartctl via the USB adapter revealed what I expected to see. In the process above, I came across this thread.
At this point I had not written anything at all to the drive, not even a partition table. Here's the drive info as it arrived:
Code:
Device Model: Samsung SSD 870 EVO 250GB
Serial Number: S61WNX0RA10063L
Firmware Version: SVT01B6Q
Made In: China
Production Date: 2021 10 16
The interesting thing is that I ordered this on 2023-03-05 and got a drive made all the way back in late 2021! I ordered it via a seller on Amazon UK though, so perhaps it's just that they've not sold their lower capacity stock because more folks are opting for the higher capacities? It's not like a 500GB or 1TB device is that expensive in real terms, plus the cost per GB goes down as the capacity gets larger, so maybe that could explain why the seller still has such old stock. Anyway, I opted for the 250GB because it offered more storage than I had before and I don't require a lot of storage on the laptop.
Talking of capacities, I note that this thread mainly deals with 1TB+ drives. I think there are one or two people who have mentioned 500GB drives here, but I don't recall seeing anything about the 250GB drives. I'm wondering if that's not because these drives don't suffer the problem discussed here, rather it's just a reflection of the folks who comment here, i.e. enthusiasts who are more likely to buy higher capacity drives?
So, after reading this thread and before having written anything at all to the drive, the first thing I did was to upgrade the firmware from SVT01B6Q to SVT02B6Q. I then cloned the old Seagate drive to the 870 EVO, with adjustments as necessary to utilise the entire capacity of the EVO.
Here's the output from smartctl as it is right now:
Code:
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 1
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
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 - 67
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 15
177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 099 099 000 Pre-fail Always - 1
179 Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot 0x0013 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0
181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total 0x0032 100 100 010 Old_age Always - 0
182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total 0x0032 100 100 010 Old_age Always - 0
183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0013 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 0
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0032 065 050 000 Old_age Always - 35
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
235 Unknown_Attribute 0x0012 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 5
241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 670119772
252 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 9 -
As you can see, I've run one extended test on the drive so far and it completed without error.
So, it will be interesting to see if this drive develops any premature faults in the future, especially given that the firmware was updated before any data was written to it. I will be keeping an eye on the SMART data and will come back to this thread with an update if it starts to indicate any problems.
Cheers.