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Tom B

Member

Registered: 2014-01-15

Posts: 187

Website

[SOLVED] Samsung 840 Evo SSD poor performance

I'm posting this as [SOLVED] just in case anyone else comes across this issue. This isn't a linux problem but it may affect linux users and the cause isn't obvious. Mods feel free to delete this topic but it may be useful for people searching in the future.

Samsung have identified a problem with this model of SSD which causes data access to become slower over time. They have released a "Performance restoration tool" that upgrades the firmware and restores the performance of the drive (essentially by re-writing the data to it).

The tool is available here: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/ … tAodanEAIg

As of today (27/10/2014) the tool is only for Windows but a linux version is due "At the end of October"

vesz

Member

Registered: 2009-02-16

Posts: 10

Re: [SOLVED] Samsung 840 Evo SSD poor performance

The  Linux version is out, has anyone dared to run it?

*Scared* DD:ing disk as we speak

gedgon

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2011-01-27

Posts: 95

Re: [SOLVED] Samsung 840 Evo SSD poor performance

[...]has anyone dared to run it?

Went smoothly for me.

Slizzered

Member

Registered: 2010-04-13

Posts: 13

Re: [SOLVED] Samsung 840 Evo SSD poor performance

The  Linux version is out, has anyone dared to run it?

I used a bootable USB-stick with FreeDOS, copied the content of the .zip-archive to the root folder of said USB-stick.

Everything went smoothly, whole process was over in less than 30min (250GB version).

My SSD contained NTFS, EXT4 and ZFSonLinux Log partitions.

alphaniner

Member

From: Ancapistan

Registered: 2010-07-12

Posts: 2,810

Re: [SOLVED] Samsung 840 Evo SSD poor performance

Does it do something different to SSD memory cell clearing?

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sm4tik

Member

From: Finland, Jyväskylä

Registered: 2006-11-05

Posts: 248

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Samsung 840 Evo SSD poor performance

I thought I'd already posted my experience, but I guess it's better late than never. I tried to update with the bootable cd.iso but the update failed with an error saying something like "I AM AN ERROR" which I found to be quite amusing. Luckily the error happened before starting the update process so nothing was broken. Next up was the FreeDos method mentioned by Slizzered and everything worked just fine. So just to play safe, go with the bootable usb stick method which has been confirmed to be working.