Samsung has been making quality digital products, since 1995. However, one of the latest internal hard drives for PCs, manufactured by Samsung, Samsung SSD 840 EVO, has been suffering from a lot of complaints since last month, regarding a slowdown in read performance. These hard drives were released in 2013, and are still in use by a large number of PCs, worldwide.
Samsung had released a firmware update, back in October, 2014, in order to fix the sequential read speeds, which was reported by a small number of people after not using their hard drive for an extended period of time. This update fixed the issue, and the read performance was reverted back to normal levels, but after some time, these drivers have been backsliding in read performance, once again, and some users are encountering the slowdown, once again. Thus, Samsung has promised to integrate a performance restoration tool in the new version of Samsung SSD Magician software, which will be released in March, which will fix the read performance of the hard drive.
The initial issue of slowdown in read performance was caused by a consolidation of decay in NAND charge cell and issues in NAND management algorithm. As far as the NAND cell charge decay is concerned, it is a regular phenomenon in an NAND operation, but the Samsung’s more complicated TLC NAND was more sensitive to it. Meanwhile, when Samsung’s algorithms encountered this decay, they went haphazardly into a read-retry state which resulted in the degradation in the read performance. The Samsung’s fix, released in October, edited the NAND management algorithms, and was thought to be a permanent fix of the issue.
The recent performance issues and Samsung’s statement have made it obvious that the issue is recurring, and has not been fixed as Samsung thought it to be. In the statement made by Samsung this afternoon, Samsung didn’t tell us, what the root cause of the problem is, but most probably, this issue is continuation of the initial issue. In any case, Samsung has addressed that a new fix to this issue is in the works. However, it is still not clear that whether this fix will be temporary, or permanent, unlike the last one. We hope that this issue will be fixed as soon as the updates are released.
