KVR Audio

Jennerstein · Post by **Jennerstein** » Fri Sep 26, 2014 8:25 pm

Don't know if any of you are using a Samsung 840 EVO SSD as a sample drive, but thought you might want to be aware of some issues that have come up.

I bought a 1TB Samsung 840 Evo about 6 months ago, mainly as a place to store VI samples, and such (Kontakt, Omnisphere, Stylus RMX, etc). My project drive is a 7200 RPM Western Digital. I figured since I mostly will be using the SSD for reading files, I won't really have to worry about the flash memory degradation that can happen over time with large amounts of reads and writes.

A few months ago, I perceived a slight slowdown in my DAW (Studio One) when reading samples in Kontakt, and Omnisphere, but figured it was just a Windows thing. A little bit later, I stumbled upon a thread on Overclock.net where people were reporting the same issue. Turns out that Samsung 840 Evos have dramatic slowdowns (from 400 mb/s down to 30-50 mb/s) for files older than 6 months.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1507897/sams ... -the-drive

Samsung is aware of the issue, and rumors have it that they will release a firmware fix in October. The cause of the issue is unknown, although there is some speculation it could be related to TLC.

Currently, the only way to get your speeds back up is to do re-write the files on the drive. Defrag tools also work in restoring drive speed, as the defrag moves the data on the drive around, thus rewriting the data.

As for me, I've not done any of the recommended solutions, as I'm waiting to see what Samsung does in October. If they release new firmware, I can then test to see if the new firmware fixes my drive.

Hope this helps someone.

lachrimae · Post by **lachrimae** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 1:42 am

Thanks for the heads up. I've noticed some strange read times on older files so I'm glad to hear that Samsung has acknowledged the issue...

I'm running the SSD Read Speed Tester 2.02 right now but it's taking forever (428GB of data on my 750GB Evo)...

Debutante · Post by **Debutante** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 3:32 am

nice lookin out!

lachrimae · Post by **lachrimae** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 1:19 pm

Ugh, well this pretty much says it all:

I ran a test across all 480GB of (mostly old) data and got an avg of 32MB/s

. The test took nearly 4hrs to complete:
http://i.imgur.com/PDLYpbg.png

So then I used DiskFresh on the drive (took a long time due to the slow read spead).

The new test result? 392 MB/s and the test took only 19min to complete.
http://i.imgur.com/rafU8Cu.png

I also tested load-times in Kontakt & Superior Drummer and it's stupid fast again.

I hope their mid-Oct firmware update provides a permanent fix because this is pretty sad...

mkdr · Post by **mkdr** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 1:27 pm

I had noticed some slowdown too. Never thought it was this bad though before i benchmarked my 840 Evo OS-drive just now. Yikes! Windows 7 really is great at buffering data and using the RAM efficiently because I hadn't noticed too much of a difference in use. Only a slight drop in load speed of projects and programs. The SSD seek time still keeps this faster than a spinning drive.

And luckily my streaming data is on a Kingston SSD.. witch btw has only gotten faster over time. Some updates etc have made a difference

Hoping the Samsung firmware update on 15th October will solve this!

mkdr · Post by **mkdr** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 2:59 pm

Btw.. after reading a few articles and forums online i went ahead and did a "refresh" on the data on the drive (DiskFresh app).
Earlier i was getting some 30-60mb/s read performance on some parts of the drive, some parts were much quicker. Now everything is back up to 380mb/s, consistently! Wow. Just Wow. Samsung's better come up with a good fix for this!

el-bo (formerly ebow) · Sat Sep 27, 2014 3:43 pm

timely thread. was just getting ready to buy one of these drives. 'diskfresh' is not osx, so i will wait to hear about samsung's fix

will follow this thread for any news

cheers

el-bo (formerly ebow) · Sat Sep 27, 2014 3:44 pm

.....

Keith99 · Post by **Keith99** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 5:07 pm

thanks for letting us know, this is pretty serious! Strange problem as well that an old file takes longer, would be interested what the technology reason for that is

cryophonik · Post by **cryophonik** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 5:15 pm

Great. I just bought/installed this drive in my laptop a week ago. Oh well, hopefully that firmware update fixes it before I start having problems.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 8:34 pm

According to magician, mine is fine. Write speeds are a little slow. Did an optimization just for the heck of it.

I'm worried that diskfresh is like defragging which is a no-no on SSD's?

This is the first time I've heard about this stuff.

lachrimae · Post by **lachrimae** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 8:59 pm

I'm afraid magician wouldn't be a good way to test because it'll do it's benchmark using newly written data (I presume).

If you don't want to install a benchmarking tool like SSD Read Speed Tester you could take a large single file (like a Kontakt .nkx) that's been on your drive for at least a few months and see how quickly you can copy it to another SSD drive.
You are correct that diskfresh is similar to defragging and will decrease your drive life, but if you do the math it's pretty inconsequential if you don't do it often.
These guys have written over 78TB and it's still going strong: http://ssdendurancetest.com/ssd-enduran ... 40-EVO-120

Jennerstein · Post by **Jennerstein** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 9:26 pm

Hibidy,

Yes, what lachrimae said is correct. Doing a test in Samsung Magician won't show the issue, because the benchmark test in Magician is creating/writing a new temporary file and testing the read/write speeds.

The way the issue original was discovered is that a user was copying a large file to another hard drive. The file took much longer to copy than expected, which did not make sense based on the fast read times we would expect from an SSD. He then did some research and discovered the issue appears for files older than than a few months. Newer files read at SSD speeds, older files read at much slower speeds.

I've not yet used diskrefresh on my drive. I'm hoping that the firmware is released this month, and then I can test whether it restores things back to normal. It's not certain that the firmware is being released on Oct 15, since the only article that mention that date is from a German tech site. Crossing my fingers that Samsung fixes the issue.

xNiMiNx · Post by **xNiMiNx** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 10:09 pm

I wonder if a date changer would speed it back up?

http://download.cnet.com/FileDate-Chang ... 49569.html

jdnz · Post by **jdnz** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 10:59 pm

xNiMiNx wrote:I wonder if a date changer would speed it back up?

http://download.cnet.com/FileDate-Chang ... 49569.html

nope, that's only going to cause directory blocks to be rewritten, not the actual file data

Slowdown issues for Samsung 840 EVO SSDs for files older than 3-6 months