Samsung releases October 15 fix for speed degradation 840 EVO SSDs

Samsung says it is working hard on a fix for its 840 EVO SSDs and will make the firmware available on its site on October 15. The SSDs suffer from sharply decreasing read performance with data that is more than thirty days old.

The problem has been raised by users on several sites in recent months, including Overclock.net. When reading old blocks of data, which are more than a month old, the reading speed of 840 EVO SSDs drops to 50 to 60 MB/s, while recently written blocks are neatly read at 450MB/s or higher. Many users were able to demonstrate the problem using, for example, the program HDTach v3. SSDs from Samsung’s 840 Pro series do not suffer from the problem.

PC Perspective suggests that the problem has to do with the controller being overheated by error-correcting code. The older the data, the more ecc work the controller has to endure and the higher the temperature. The controller would be whistled back at some point by the Dynamic Thermal Guard Protection, resulting in performance degradation.

Samsung announced last week that it was working on a firmware update that should fix the problem and the company now tells ComputerBase that the fix will be released on October 15.