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Comment by Modified3019 | Hacker News Reader

Related, someone decompiled Samsung’s 840 EVO ssd firmware, before Samsung later started encrypting it: http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf

Came across it looking how to deal with multiple different samsung drives caught in bad states due to shitty firmware. My original salty post warning about vendor branded Samsung drives on eBay is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37165189

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This deserves its own blog post and HN submission. Since SSDs have been 2x to 4x prices people are now more likely to buy used and could get burned.

BTW thank you for raising this.

Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fridges failing after a few years (or having too little coolant in them so that they make loud popping sounds when running and Samsung saying you’re holding it wrong)

From these experiences, I’m going out of my way to never buy anything made by Samsung.

You forget exploding devices or the decision of selling it's crap exynos thing in Europe

Right. And their complete contempt for user privacy on their smart TVs. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, I'll even pay extra to buy anything but a Samsung device.

The Galaxy smartphones are still some of the best.

They don't do VoLTE when rooted. Their own stock ROM is on par with iPhone-level unworkable UI garbage. Apps that work on everything but not Samsung Galaxy. The only ROMs you can feasibly get on most models are limited to GSI builds.

"The best" must be quite a low bar.

"Apps that work on everything but not Samsung Galaxy."

This is interesting, what are some examples?

Telegram. When I used that, everyone would get their messages except those who had a samsung because it's continuously on a background task shooting spree.

The weird thing is WhatsApp isn't affected but I'm never going to install that facebook crap. Even the mandatory work phone doesn't have it.

That’s your opinion. I’ll never get one and I absolutely don’t trust Samsung with my personal data.

Ironic that the Secure Folder feature Galaxy phones have is one of the most secure enclaves.

Ironic indeed when you see the utter contempt Samsung has for its user’s data otherwise (their apps and “smart” devices are a privacy nightmare)

What makes you think this?

How do I know if I have a drive in this situation?

In my case, the drive suddenly only shows having 1GB of read only space available. The firmware version will be reported as “ERRORMOD” (meaning, error mode). There are no warning signs, it just happens.

All data is lost the moment you see ERRORMOD, there is no recovery of data that I am aware of. It is sometimes possible to clear the drive and recover function for the now untrustworthy drive: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/pm9a3-firm...

It’s not the only way a drive can fail, but it’s the most immediately obvious one.

Other ways of the firmware failing result in no drive showing up at all, or data corruption. Physical failures can also happen, like breakage of the solder balls under the chips (which fixable enough to get data off it).

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