Question Samsung 870 EVO reliability ?

[lamyprid]

Hello everyone, I have a Samsung 870 EVO for almost 2 years, and I want to buy another one. However, in the past few days, many people have been saying that there's a high chance of the drive failing. But based on my experience in the past two years, I haven't encountered any errors with the drive. I also don't understand how to interpret the information in the text below in Crystal Disk Info. In your opinion, is there a high chance that my current drive will fail in the next few years? And do you suggest that I buy another Samsung drive?

For context, I purchased this drive in 2021.

https://imgur.com/a/TyaFgzl

 

[zinkles]

the failing was only in certain batches that were produced in January and February of 2021. other drives don't really seem to encounter any error like that, so if you purchase one that is not made in the above mentioned dates it would be good to go.

only some of the drives are affected and If you do think you'll get an issue you can purchase a similar one instead of the 870evo.

as for how to read the SMART values, you don't need to actually, cause crystaldiskinfo will show a Yellow or Red dot/circle In front of that value if it's ever bad. currently your dot/circle is in blueish color which is the default value.

 

[MWink64]

Hello everyone, I have a Samsung 870 EVO for almost 2 years, and I want to buy another one. However, in the past few days, many people have been saying that there's a high chance of the drive failing. But based on my experience in the past two years, I haven't encountered any errors with the drive. I also don't understand how to interpret the information in the text below in Crystal Disk Info. In your opinion, is there a high chance that my current drive will fail in the next few years? And do you suggest that I buy another Samsung drive?

For context, I purchased this drive in 2021.

https://imgur.com/a/TyaFgzl

Do you have good backups of that drive? If not, you need to do so immediately! Your drive is showing signs of the issue that plagued the 870 EVO. Even if you haven't noticed it, there's a good chance some corruption has already occurred.

I would suggest making sure you have copies (plural) of all the valuable data on the drive, perform a Secure Erase, and RMA it to Samsung. The drive has degraded and could fail at any time.

As for the 870 EVO line, it may (emphasis on may) be safe to buy one now. It sounds like they may have resolved the issue with the latest variant (released last year). Personally, I'm still a little hesitant and would lean towards the Crucial MX500.

the failing was only in certain batches that were produced in January and February of 2021. other drives don't really seem to encounter any error like that, so if you purchase one that is not made in the above mentioned dates it would be good to go.

only some of the drives are affected and If you do think you'll get an issue you can purchase a similar one instead of the 870evo.

as for how to read the SMART values, you don't need to actually, cause crystaldiskinfo will show a Yellow or Red dot/circle In front of that value if it's ever bad. currently your dot/circle is in blueish color which is the default value.

The issue affected a far larger swath of 870 EVOs, produced far beyond Feb 2021. It was likely not resolved until at least last year (2023).

Your suggestion is not a safe way to interpret the information conveyed by CrystalDiskInfo. In general, it won't alert you until a value passes a threshold set by the drive. Most drives have thresholds set to such a level that they won't trip, until it's in very bad shape. I don't think I've seen a drive trip SMART, until it was well past the point of being salvageable. Even plenty of catastrophically failing drives don't trip SMART.

CrystalDiskInfo does go a bit further and monitor the raw values of a small number of attributes (mostly relating to bad sectors and SSD life remaining) and alert the user, if they reach a threshold set in the program. These are how it usually alerts most people, prior to catastrophic failure. However, these are only a handful of attributes and aren't always the ones most significant to a particular drive. Interpreting SMART values can be a bit of an art. If CrystalDiskInfo alerts you that something may be wrong, you should definitely pay attention. However, even if it doesn't, doesn't mean all is well. The OP's drive is NOT healthy.

 

[kerberos_20]

cause crystaldiskinfo will show a Yellow or Red dot/circle In front of that value if it's ever bad.

no it doesnt
drive on this picture is failing

reallocated sector count, uncorrectable error count and ECC Error rate is too high

samsung magician smart info should show it in red if theres an issue, crystaldisk mark wont tell you if theres issue

 

[lamyprid]

So what am I going to do about it? This is my bootdrive; should I update the firmware on it or is it totally useless now?

Man, I expect too much from Samsung. I think this brand is more reliable than others. Any budget SSD with DRAM can you suggest?

 

[kerberos_20]

So what am I going to do about it? This is my bootdrive; should I update the firmware on it or is it totally useless now?

Man, I expect too much from Samsung. I think this brand is more reliable than others. Any budget SSD with DRAM can you suggest?

considering how old your drive is and how low your counters are, your drive should be still fine for daily use

 

[lamyprid]

considering how old your drive is and how low your counters are, your drive should be still fine for daily use

I think I have used it as a boot drive for 2 years and 3 months, formatted it three times, and have not encountered a single problem with it. I'm just afraid because I found a thread saying that their drives are failing.

 

[MWink64]

So what am I going to do about it? This is my bootdrive; should I update the firmware on it or is it totally useless now?

Man, I expect too much from Samsung. I think this brand is more reliable than others. Any budget SSD with DRAM can you suggest?

I think I have used it as a boot drive for 2 years and 3 months, formatted it three times, and have not encountered a single problem with it. I'm just afraid because I found a thread saying that their drives are failing.

You may not have noticed a problem with it but the drive has internally recognized that errors have occurred. I have heard of people who think their drive is just fine and then run a scan and realize that some data has already become corrupt. It is entirely possible for the problem to go unnoticed, until the system attempts to read data that the drive can no longer properly decipher or it simply fails catastrophically.

At the very least, I'd recommend running a full read scan of the drive. Samsung's utility can do it or you can use something more general, like HDDScan's Read test. I'd keep tabs on the SMART attributes before and after the scan. I wouldn't be surprised if they get even worse.

You can update the firmware, if you wish. However, I would never trust this drive with important data, and I'd assume it could die completely at any second (something one should assume with any drive but even more so here). As I said, I'd wipe it and RMA it. The 870 EVO is new enough that the warranty should still be good. As for comparable drives, the Crucial MX500 (TLC NAND and 512MB DRAM) is currently my preference.

 

[fzabkar]

Samsung 870 Evo -- is it a dud model?

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=42876

 

[geofelt]

Anything can and will fail in time.
But Samsung has some good stats going.
Here is an older report showing no failures for samsung EVO:

Most Reliable PC Hardware of 2021

Here at Puget Systems, our goal is not only to provide the fastest workstations possible, but the most reliable as well. As a part of our constant drive to offer only the highest quality components possible, we track and regularly review the failure rates for each part we carry. Today, we want...

www.pugetsystems.com

 

[lamyprid]

I have a question is this thing progressive or can I somehow manage it to slowly take errors over time? Somehow, the only files here are our only software applications; all of the important files are on another drive.

 

[fzabkar]

Anything can and will fail in time.
But Samsung has some good stats going.
Here is an older report showing no failures for samsung EVO:

Most Reliable PC Hardware of 2021

Here at Puget Systems, our goal is not only to provide the fastest workstations possible, but the most reliable as well. As a part of our constant drive to offer only the highest quality components possible, we track and regularly review the failure rates for each part we carry. Today, we want...

www.pugetsystems.com

Yes, it's an old report (2019 - 2021), but later reports tell a different story:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2023/02/02/update-on-samsung-ssd-reliability/

For many years, Samsung solid-state drives (SSDs) were among the most reliable components in our workstations. We wrote about this and praised their incredibly low failure rates many times, but something changed in the last year. We started to see abnormally high failure rates in the field ...

Samsung is investigating these reports, and we will continue to work with them to help arrive at a solution for both our customers and the public in general. In the meantime, we felt it was prudent to shift our product line to an alternative product while this situation unfolds and we learn more.

As such, we are transitioning our 1 and 2TB NVMe drives over to Sabrent.

 

[MWink64]

I have a question is this thing progressive or can I somehow manage it to slowly take errors over time? Somehow, the only files here are our only software applications; all of the important files are on another drive.

The drive could drop dead at any time and may have already lost data. I won't even say without warning, because yours has sirens blaring. No one can stop you from continuing to use it. Just be aware of the consequences.

 

[lamyprid]

Yeah, I know. I analyze all my files, including my video and music, and none of them are corrupt. Those values I posted in crystal disk info have been unchanged since December 21.

 

[Lafong]

analyze all my files, including my video and music, and none of them are corrupt.

I'm wondering how you analyzed them to confirm no corruption?

129 files or 129,000?

Did you open every file to see what happens?

 

[lamyprid]

I'm wondering how you analyzed them to confirm no corruption?

129 files or 129,000?

Did you open every file to see what happens?

Even though my SSD is 500GB, I only use 200GB of it. And that includes all my videos, pictures, and a few documents, and yes, I check all of them one by one with no corruption. To be honest, I think I'm just lucky, even if there are bad sectors affecting the OS. I think I'll not be able to use it now. Yesterday, I wanted to test it and put a 50-GB file on the C drives, and there was no problem. But still, I need to prepare it, backup it, and wait for it to die.

 

[Lafong]

I've got 140,000 files that were all believed to be readable and uncorrupted when they were first saved.

However, once in a great while (maybe once a year) I find that one won't open...it became corrupted after the first save, for whatever reason. Possibly related to copying, backups, power outages, or.......????

90% of this 140,000 will never be opened again in my lifetme.

It's not a life or death situation, but I'm looking for a way to identify the corrupted files without opening all 140,000. So far, no one has a practical idea.

 

[fzabkar]

This Powershell command line computes an SHA256 hash for every MP4 file in the specified directory and its subdirectories, and then writes the results to a text file.

Get-ChildItem X:\your_path\*.mp4 -Recurse | Get-FileHash > X:\MP4_SHA256.txt

X: is the drive letter of your SSD.

 

[MWink64]

Yeah, I know. I analyze all my files, including my video and music, and none of them are corrupt. Those values I posted in crystal disk info have been unchanged since December 21.

Even though my SSD is 500GB, I only use 200GB of it. And that includes all my videos, pictures, and a few documents, and yes, I check all of them one by one with no corruption. To be honest, I think I'm just lucky, even if there are bad sectors affecting the OS. I think I'll not be able to use it now. Yesterday, I wanted to test it and put a 50-GB file on the C drives, and there was no problem. But still, I need to prepare it, backup it, and wait for it to die.

Just because a file opens doesn't mean there's no corruption. Unless you did something like hash them and compare them to known good hashes or did a bit-by-bit comparison to an old backup, it's hard to know.

This Powershell command line computes an SHA256 hash for every MP4 file in the specified directory and its subdirectories, and then writes the results to a text file.

Get-ChildItem X:\your_path\*.mp4 -Recurse | Get-FileHash > X:\MP4_SHA256.txt

X: is the drive letter of your SSD.

Thanks for sharing that. Is there any easy way to compare the results from subsequent runs, to make any mismatches obvious? I've been trying to find a (preferably cross-platform) way of generating and verifying file hashes but I have yet to find a solution that works the way I'd like.

 

[fzabkar]

Is there any easy way to compare the results from subsequent runs, to make any mismatches obvious? I've been trying to find a (preferably cross-platform) way of generating and verifying file hashes but I have yet to find a solution that works the way I'd like.

I don't know of any.

 

[lamyprid]

Update: Since December 21, 2023, there has been no increase in errors and no sign of failure.