Samsung 870 EVO SSD, should I cancel order?

I've ordered one to replace a dying SATA HDD, but have just chanced across warnings online about some Samsung EVO 8*0 series SSDs being kernel blacklisted, and firmware bug warnings too.

I'd seen other reports saying this has cleared up since 2022, but others say it is still a thing. Have I been stupid and bought what was widely described as a decent SSD from a supposedly competent manufacturer, both points being called in to question by some of the reports I've seen?

Yet other webpages say have anecdotes of EVO 860 SSDs running fine under Linux for years.

Is it a matter of checking the device's serial number when it arrives, returning it without using it if it has a number within a certain range?

I've ordered one but can still cancel, or sent it right back for a refund before I open the package, should I do so? in which case what is the right choice for a 1TB SATA SSD for use with Linux Mint?

Thank you

That's what I'm using and it works great. Linux Mint too.

I went ahead and cancelled before I saw your post. I think the order will cancel before shipping. Right now I'm in a really nasty position right now, I've got to get a new drive FAST. I've got only one PC with a working drive in it, a spare PC which is old and probably hasn't the healthiest HDD in it either, I've no other way of getting online (short of live USB for emergency) until I've got a new disk. I've had a terrible experience with failing HDDs in the past year, I really want to go to SSD. But I keep seeing terrible reports of their failures, and even those which aren't widely reported on often seem to have bizarre conflicts with Linux which are rarely reported on.

The only source of data on these matters is trawling over various forum threads, the manufacturers never openly report issues, especially not those which only manifest when a Linux OS is in use.

And sites about "the best SSD for linux" seem to either do nothing but report manufacturer's own specs clearly with no testing actually done by the so-called "reviewer", or they focus on nVME SSDs with that RAM-stick style form factor, which won't fit where I need.

Please, and quickly, tell me some GOOD choices for 1TB SATA (2.5 inch) SSDs which work well with Linux, have good long term reliability (speed isn't paticularly important), and preferably available easily from Amazon UK.

I've got to get one in the next few days, and I've been caught in "analysis paralysis" with this. I'd been trying to select one for months, while I knew my last working HDD was on its way out, now it has gone read-only I'm in a real rush to get an SSD, but with still no better an idea of which models can actually be trusted.

Edited by rp88, 06 May 2024 - 11:29 PM.

Have a look at Crucial's range. I have one of their 1TB drives in my desktop which dual boots and it is now about two years old. While the larger part of my activity - by some margin - is in Windows I have never had a problem running Mint when I want to. Apart from that I have three other 500 GB Crucial drives in various laptops, one - which is now about four year old and also dual boots - is in the laptop I use for teaching and whenever I need portable computing and has never given me a problem running either Windows or Mint.

 

While Crucial's range may not be the fastest SSDs around they certainly seem to be reliable.

 

Chris Cosgrove

He has a duplicate topic in internal hardware

I, too, will corroborate Chris's recommendation. I've been running a 1 TB Crucial MX500 for around 3 years now. It's not the newest tech - in fact, it's SLC technology - but it's for this precise reason that these are often run by enterprise organisations; they're reliable, and there's less to go wrong than there is with MLC or QLC. The long-term life-span predictions on these are good.....and they're quite reasonably-priced, too.

 

300 MB/s write / 500 MB/s read speeds aren't exactly to be sneezed at either, in my book. I'd happily recommend them to anybody.

 

 

Mike. 

Edited by Mike_Walsh, 07 May 2024 - 09:27 PM.

Sorry for double threading, I opened this one because I came across the fact the EVO 870 was on a Linux kernel blacklist, so I thought asking this in the Linux forum was a good move.

In the end I decided not to chance it with Samsung's EVO 870 or crucial's MX500, as I could find horror stories about both. I went for a nearly enterprise grade WD Red SA500 SSD, at only £20 more than the evo 870 or MX500.

It is on its way, I've heard it can be a bit slow for an SSD, but still way faster than an HDD, but it is supposedly built with reliability in mind, has never had any reports of frimware bugs (never needed any fw updates released for it at all) and still using a circa 2019 controller chip, from the pre-covid-overreaction era when there wasn't a chips crisis and manufacturers didn't cut corners so badly.

When it does turn up I could still use a few things clarified about partitioning,
Do I do that just like for a normal HDD, or must I leave a special empty space before the first (uefi related) partition?

Should I leave maybe 100GB or 50GB at the end unpartitioned, to let the drive have this space for overprovisioning, or do I partition the entire disc?

And is it wiserfor long-term SSD health to have one, or just two big partitions, rather than a large number of smaller ones (with HDDs I've always had the little uefi one, one for root, one for home, and one for big media and zip files that get read fairly often but edited nearly never). To my understanding partitioning limits damage when a HDD starts dying (one partition goes read-only or such but the rest of the system limps along enough for you to know what is wrong, like a fault in root which sends it read-only still lets you log in as your home user), but do partitions limit the amount of disc "area" any file, when updated, can over-write to and thereby increase the rate of disc wearing in certain regions?

Thank You

Edited by rp88, 08 May 2024 - 11:13 AM.

I have 3 Samsung 840 EVO's 1TB SSD's in my machine that are 10 years old this month. They have not shown any decrease in speed.

What Kernel blacklist are you referring to with 870 EVO's?

I do agree that the MX500 has issues per many hours on Telegram and other support sites helping users.

Partitioning has no impact on the lifetime of a drive.

Edited by cryptodan, 08 May 2024 - 11:21 AM.

The main blacklist in the Linux kernel, some reporting here:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Samsung-860-870-More-Quirks

Thanks for clarifying that partitioning has no impact.

The one thing I can really take away from the horrid exprience of picking an SSD, is that all the high quality stuff seems to be mostly aimed at nvme, not SATA, which is a problem when it is a SATA drive you're replacing on a PC which has no nvme slots.

Edited by rp88, 08 May 2024 - 12:04 PM.

I have a Samsung 860 500GB SSD and it's been running Linux Mint Cinnamon perfectly for nearly 5 years in my Tower...comes with a 5 year warranty too. 

 

I have a Samsung 500GB SSD in my old Laptop running Mint Cinnamon just fine...also with a 5 year warranty.

 

I have Trim set to run daily...every now and then I'll run it manually...never had any problems...you can't believe every thing you read...you don't get a 5 year warranty for garbage. 

A little bit more on partitioning, is there actually any good reason to have a "multitude" of partitions, or is there no advantage to that over having just one or just two? Infact, in modern times has there even been much advantage to having many partitions on an HDD, let alone on SSD?

I've usually had:
UEFI stuff
root
home
big media files

But is there any reason not just to have
UEFI stuff
root
home including any big media files

Or even
UEFI stuff
root, including home and all media files

P.S. I don't dual boot, and I use some Wine software as well as a deb based version of firefox (ESR, not otherwise available in repos, and also with this version I can update firefox like one does for FF on Windows without having to go through the repos every time) which is in a subfolder of home, so in practice some of my programs are living on home as well as true linux programs being under root

Thanks

P.S. thanks for the reports of well behaved Samsung EVOs. Maybe all the bad reports are from more recent batches, in SATA SSDs the only thing manufacturers seem to be chasing in terms of design nowadays is adjustments aimed at making them cheaper for them to manufacture, or maybe I read too much in to the bad reports I saw. As my order for the WD Red SA500 is on the way, I guess I'll be finding out if it is good enough. I know it looks slow compared to many SSDs, but I expect it'll still be a lot faster than the HDDs I'm used to, and a lot less vulnerable to vibration.

Edited by rp88, 09 May 2024 - 09:56 PM.

I stopped creating partitions years ago...when I install Mint on my 500GB SSD the installer creates the Boot Partition 512MB and the Root partition is the rest of the Drive 465GB. 

 

I would show you but it seems I'm not allowed to show or post images.  Motherboard is UEFI and I have a 50GB VM and don't dual boot either and have wine installed too.

I have been happy with my approx. cost about 35 bucks with a 5 year warranty Western Digitial Blue 1TB SSD drives.

 

Delivers right to my door also.

It sounds more like the problems were in early batches, so there's a chance that they were fixed in firmware updates or people don't notice an impact from the workarounds. It also sounds more like a compatibility problem with certain SATA controllers, so any problem depends on the motherboard chipset.

 

Western Digital SSDs seem good (at least the one that I have, which is NVMe). I personally don't like Samsung SSDs. In my experience, Samsung consumer drives are less reliable than their business-class versions (or even competing consumer drives, some of which even have faster write speeds while costing the same or less). A few models (including the 870 Evo) also had premature failure problems that were (hopefully) fixed with firmware updates. It feels like you're paying a huge premium for the brand and not getting anything in return except some Windows bloatware. Samsung also has a track record of doing incredibly stupid (and surely illegal) stuff to deny warranty claims, such as telling a customer that their SSD only had a 2-year warranty instead of the promised 5-year warranty because it wasn't purchased directly from Samsung or that video of a Samsung technician intentionally scratching a high-end TV to void the warranty (not an SSD, but still concerning).

Edited by lti, 11 May 2024 - 05:19 PM.

Yes maybe the Firmware is not getting updated on the EVO's : https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/support/tools/

 

Now I have no idea if the Firmware is compatible with Linux or not as there is no mention to Updating but Firmware is Firmware and should be OS independent.