Samsung SSD 840EVO Performance Restoration

As some may know an issue has been discovered on Samsung 840EVO SSDs where old data performance is degraded and it has long load times. This has been confirmed by Samsung and they have issued different firmware updates for different systems.

I was wondering if anybody has tried the firmware update from Samsung and which one they used


http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/us/html/support/downloads.html



The test results show that the drive's performance goes horrible after time passes unless you do the firmware update.

freaker thank you for the heads up!

Humm… well this is not news that I want. I have a 240GB mSATA drive that I am using on my Clover test bed. The performance of this drive is great but then it is new and has about 20 hours of run time.

I pulled the mSATA drive and placed it in a 2.5” adapter and used the Cavalry “Standalone SATA HDD Duplicator” to clone the drive. Doing this I preserve the EFI, Yosemite and Recovery partitions just in case the firmware update has an impact on the data.



I followed the Samsung document and made up a bootable USB flash drive with the update. The process is straight foreword with good on screen instructions. The time to run is lengthy, in my case the update process took 50 minutes.

The updated drive booted back into Yosemite (via Clover) and the before and after performance snap shots are a little different but more then acceptable.



Before the update.



After the update.

An observation to share:

It has crossed my mind several times that when using Chimera the clone partitions were adequate. However with Clover using the EFI partition I should probably clone the drive to have a true recovery path. The alternative to a hardware solution is using Clonezilla which works very well but is a LINUX solution that takes some study to use the first time.

Well that is a wrap for now.

Good modding,
neil

many thanks for your post!!!!

See this post on MacRumor's forum for a solution for Macs.

Running the Samsung Drive Restoration Utility on Macs with no optical drive

Note...I have not tried it yet. So, YMMV.

The instructions and documentation on the Samsung web page are more then adequate. They offer up an ISO image for CDs and a zipped file archive for USB flash drives. And in the zipped file there are instructions also. This is no more difficult then flashing a BIOS however it does take much longer.

The instructions do assume that the user knows how to create a dos bootable flash drive.

I elected to clone my drive before running the firmware update as a precaution. In my case it appears that my data was not impacted. The system has been running Yosemite for over 6 hours without issue post update.

Good modding,
neil