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

[dranniK]

Welp... guess it's time for a RMA? SN: S6PNNJ0R50****

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Didn't make it 2 years ?

 

[dranniK]

Nope. I just learned about this issue last night when shopping for a 4TB 870 EVO. Are newer revisions having the same issue?

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
I think they're all cursed at this point.

 

[dranniK]

Wonderful. I've had bad luck this weekend with drives; had a brand new 8TB external delivered yesterday and the drive wouldn't initialize, the 870 evo discovery in my screenshot above, and now I found out I have one of the 980 PROs with the error issue as well (which luckily seems to be fixable with the firmware).

Any recommendations on a mass storage SSD 2-4TB in 2.5" format for general purpose storage? It will be backed up by cold storage but just looking for something to have 'readily' available on my desktop for multimedia and misc. in lieu of being backed up. Was reading there were issues with MX500s as well so I'm at a lost of what drive I can put a little bit of faith in at the moment...

 

[tpudine]

I've heard that 4TB MX500s may be shipping with QLC now, though not confirmed.
Plus the 4TB model only has 512MB DRAM instead of the expected 4GB (Micron says it's for cost savings)

To be honest SATA SSDs as a whole are in a terrible place right now.

EVO and Crucial MX have historically been reliable recommendations but with their recent issues even they aren't guaranteed to be free of problems, meanwhile nearly everything else on the SATA market is DRAMless NAND lottery junk.

At thus point you may be better off just getting a used 850 / 860 PRO from eBay.

 

[80251]

@tpudine
I bought a NIB 850 Pro 256 that turned out to be well used @ ~3 TiB written (and I firmly believe the seller knew this). I received a partial refund and the SSD hasn't given me any problems yet. Samsung knew what they were doing with the 850 Pro series.

 

[imarti]

870 EVO,
why are all options from 'diagnostic scan' down unavailable, ssd is empty?

edit:
The 850 EVO says 'diagnostic scan' not supported same, can the 850 not be scanned? If I were to update the firmware to a new one, can it be done via usb stick or not?
Several ver. I've tried Magician and it doesn't give access to the 'diagnostic scan' even once, I can access SMART, but only Magician ver. 6.2.1. gives output to excel.csv.
I have absolutely no idea why?

 

[80251]

@imarti
That is weird, after reading this thread, the first thing I did with my 870 QVO 4 TiB was scan it and it was empty. Maybe Samsung doesn't want you scanning an 870 EVO -- they're afraid of what you'll find out!

 

[kevin335200]

Hi,
I think they're all cursed at this point.

970 EVO Plus manifactured in February 2023 is still cursed. 4B2QEXM7 is the latest firmware for 970 EP.

Source: https://tieba.baidu.com/p/8302583639

 

[imeem1]

I'm on my second replacement. Past 2 months computer would randomly hang/freeze. SSD pasted the short and extended test, and short SMART test.

I will run the extended SMART test to see.

 

[ThrashZone]

970 EVO Plus manifactured in February 2023 is still cursed. 4B2QEXM7 is the latest firmware for 970 EP.
View attachment 288657

Source: https://tieba.baidu.com/p/8302583639

Hi,
Yeah noticed they were dumping them last week and still are 2tb for 130.us

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-Plus-MZ-V7S1T0B/dp/B07MFZXR1B?th=1

 

[80251]

So if Samsung can't be trusted anymore which SSD manufacturers are still trustworthy? Particularly for SSD's >= 4 TiB in size?

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Not sure about 4tb but western digital blue 2tb were 120.us

 

[chrcoluk]

Nope. I just learned about this issue last night when shopping for a 4TB 870 EVO. Are newer revisions having the same issue?

Because Samsung are been silent, we dont know the answer to that question.

 

[Justicator]

So, been seeing odd issues for a few weeks with Steam and my harddrive. A warning about anyone using Steam - when it runs into a bad sector updating a game it will continue to validate/patch over and over until you stop it - found this out the hard way. Found the errors in the Windows Event Log and combined with game location identified the culprit as my 870 Evo. Dug some more and found this forum and installed Samsung Magician and CrystalDiskInfo and sure enough they've both confirmed my drive is on it's way out. Before I updated the firmware CDI was showing stats but saying the drive was good; once I updated the firmware it changed to bad. You can see from the partial serial # it's the S6PTNJ series. I bought it in June of 2021. I am going to RMA it but buy a replacement to copy the data for while I wait for Samsung. Still researching to see if I want to get another 870 and hope things are better or switch brands - I've always been a big Samsung consumer but the fact that this is the newest drive added to my system and the 3 860 1TB I have and 1 850 are older and far less load is disappointing. I added this drive when my games drive ran low on space. Thanks!

 

[Selaya]

So if Samsung can't be trusted anymore which SSD manufacturers are still trustworthy? Particularly for SSD's >= 4 TiB in size?

look for used (but not abused) 4tb 860 pro

 

[chrcoluk]

look for used (but not abused) 4tb 860 pro

+1, I would trust a lightly used 860 with clean SMART over a new 870 now. You might even be able to find new 860s as well on ebay from old stock.

 

[Selaya]

alternatively something like an s4620 should do the trick, but those tend to be on the more expensive (and more abused) side

 

[80251]

@Selaya
The Intel D3-S4520 7.68 TB is expensive at $773, but the Intel D3-S4520 3.84TB TB is only slightly more expensive ($413) than the Samsung 870 QVO "4" TiB SSD I bought for $366.34. The Intel SSD is probably a lot faster than my Samsung QVO though.

It looks impressive though, especially the PBW (yep, that's petabytes written, not terabytes written) lifetime:

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/w...ture-optimized-ssd-d3-s4520-product-brief.pdf

 

[unspecified_error]

870 EVO,
why are all options from 'diagnostic scan' down unavailable, ssd is empty?

I don't know, but maybe check that the 870 EVO is appropriately formatted so as to be accessible to the Windows system. You could check that in Windows Disk Management (diskmgmt) and format it there if necessary. Samsung Magician may require it for the scanning to function.

 

[80251]

I scanned my 870 QVO before it was formatted -- first thing I did when I got it installed, especially after reading about the 870 EVO series.

 

[SPDIF]

870 EVO,
why are all options from 'diagnostic scan' down unavailable, ssd is empty?

edit:
The 850 EVO says 'diagnostic scan' not supported same, can the 850 not be scanned? If I were to update the firmware to a new one, can it be done via usb stick or not?
Several ver. I've tried Magician and it doesn't give access to the 'diagnostic scan' even once, I can access SMART, but only Magician ver. 6.2.1. gives output to excel.csv.
I have absolutely no idea why?

As for why it does not scan on your PC, read this first;

Your disk is encrypted or not enough space left, or not an NTFS volume. Samsung driver V3.3 must be installed for NVMe.

Version 6.2.1? I think you mean 7.2.1, this is latest version.

 

[imarti]

The SSD is located in the LT,

1) First I did the Benchmark test from Magician in SATA2 (HDD-rack) and SATA3 (regular slot) and the speeds were OK.

2) I filled the 870EVO with various files so that the SSD entered red (view in windows explorer), after that I read the data with MiniTool Partition Wizard and it went without error.
3) The second test is the Destructive write/read test (Hard Disk Sentinel), everything went OK.

After that I installed the OS twice, I installed a fresh OS win10LTSC, it's the same, only now Magician 7.0.1 (and newer versions behaves the same) gives SMART output to excel.csv - that's the only difference. Magician Diagnostic-Scan will not work. (then I saw that the health is at 99%) and this is what SMART says,

I would ask are the results ok whether to stay on the old firmware or switch to the new one, (if switching to the new one how to update because LT does not have access to the net.)

 

[Selaya]

update the firmware and post the first 9 digits/characters of the serial (they indicate the model, location and date of manufacture; the serial proper doesn't begin until thereafter)