Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrenvi | Hacker News Reader

Samsung 870 EVO drives were also known to fail early including my 2TB model.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/samsung-870-evo-b...

Yes, this bit me just last month. Around October 2022 I purchased 3 Samsung 870 EVO 2TBs for use in a RAID array. By January 2023, all three of them failed within a week of each other!

Fortunately they failed one by one, so I was barely was able to recover my RAID array by pulling out one drive at a time, powering the computer off, and waiting for the RMA replacement to arrive.

But imagine my shock to see one drive fail... only to replace it with an RMA... and then days later, seeing the next drive fail... and the next!

A perfect example why RAID ain’t backup

Indeed! Fortunately the RAID was also backed-up offsite. But, the entire process was shocking in several ways.

At least Samsung was fairly speedy with the RMAs and it was basically no-questions-asked... because I imagine they're getting tons of these mailed back to them.

Did they require the failed drives to be returned? Did the secure erase function work on a failed drive? I guess this is a good reason for full disk encryption even on machines where I'm satisfied with their physical security.

Yes, they sent a prepaid label to return the bad drives. I did a secure erase both via Linux command line and via their proprietary software and it seemed to work. The whole process took about 3 weeks per drive.

when equipping a storage system, it does make sense to use disks from different manufacturers, different models, and different vintages (manufacturing batches).

equipping a storage system with disks all of the same make, model, and vintage is invoking the statistics gods to strike failure all at once (or close enough that you won't be able to keep up with the rate of failure and time to rebuild)

personal experience: attempting to rescue a failing 192 disk system containing disks all of the same make and model. wearisome.

I just had a 2TB 870 EVO fail too! There were SMART errors about uncorrectable errors, and I saw CRC errors in the OS. I lost some data.

This issue is all over the Internet, yet Samsung would not acknowledge it was a known issue. They also refused my RMA because the corner of one of the plastic port guides was chipped - we're talking about a miniscule chip, barely visible with the human eye. So despite the fact this drive was obviously defective, Samsung won't replace it. So I'm down £350 (£225 for the original drive, and £125 for the Crucial I had to buy to replace it), through no fault of my own.

I'm not buying Samsung SSDs again - problems are one thing, but how you deal with them is paramount.

I panicked for a second until I realized mine is a 860 2TB EVO and I bought it back in 2019. It still has zero block and other errors after 15k hours according to smart.

> seems to primarily affect drives produced in January/February 2021

That is interesting, I wonder if it's another one of those cases where the supply chain shortages forced them into respinning the boards with some slightly out of spec parts. It's certainly been a major problem for anyone making PCBs.

Yep, my 2TB also got hit by this - did an RMA in November

The replacement drive they sent me has behaved itself so far, touch wood

Reply on news.ycombinator.com