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Comment by madez | Hacker News Reader

It feels like Samsung used the Linux community here as a free testbed.

Samsung knew that only Linux supported queued trim, so releasing it without proper testing is just externalizing the disproportionately increased cost of testing to the Linux community.

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In this case it was un-queued TRIM (I forgot to mention it in the blogpost). We have reached to Samsung and although it looked good at the beginning now they are silent for more than a month without any progress.

I was refering to the Native Command Queued trim (hence "queued trim"), not the traditional trim command.

Is the loss of reputation really worth less than the value of the externalised testing?

That remains to be seen. I really hope not.

With Samsungs finished-forms walling the company already tells Linux users to not expect any support, at all. So, that is consisting with the testbed-theory.

> With Samsungs finished-forms walling the company already tells Linux users to not expect any support, at all.

I'm sorry. I'm too dumb to parse this. :( Would you kindly rephrase it?

Thanks much. :)

    I'm sorry. I'm too dumb to parse this. :(

I am sorry. I was too dumb to phrase it understandibly, so the shame is on me. The sentence smelled problematic to me but after several times rereading it I concluded it is understandable. I should have gone with my guts…

Here is another try: Samsung's support walls with prewritten answers that say Linux is open and thus Linux is unsupported, and this action of Samsung is consisting with the testbed-theory.

I think the confusion stems from your verbing of "wall".

Don't sweat it, I'm the king of less-than-comprehensible statements. :)

Anyway, I get your statement now. Maybe instead of saying "walls" you should say "stonewalls" (derived from "stonewalling")?

Loss of reputation isn't a real thing in this industry. Pretty much all hard drive manufacturers have had high-profile "bad" models, for example.

It's a real enough thing that the IBM DeathStar incident [1] [2] was a large factor in making IBM exit the harddisk market (sold off to Hitachi)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar

[2] http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/index.html

But they're still in business making hard drives, under the DeskStar name. Seagate had a round of failures at one point. I'm sure there are people out there who've sworn off WD as well.

Is Seagate back to being good? We had 100 drive failures in a batch of 120 HP netbooks, and we had a large number of our server drives go down the tube. I switched to WD at that point.

Who? If you're referring to IBM, then they're not. IBM sold off their entire hard-disk division to Hitachi (which a few years ago sold it off to WD).

If you're referring to Hitachi, then they did continue it, yes, but they bought it on a fire-sale, and their name was not attached to the original affair, so they presumably did not see it as particularly risky.

Only because up until recently getting in the HD game was prohibitively expensive due to the engineering and capital requirements for designing spinning disks. Now anyone can buy some flash media, a pre-cooked controller firmware, combine the two and sell at competitive rates. There are something like five or six competitive SSD makers right now and many more bottom feeders. There are two competitive spinning disk makers and its been that way for decades, ignoring the occasional small third-party player like Hitachi.

I once was a huge fan of Samsung. But with the EVO disaster and this one, I really regret to have bought one of these.

The EVO was well covered, but these being from the PRO line it's even worse... Intel SSD have been praised for a long time, they seem the only stable brand around.

Yes, it seems. Still I don't like them much, since they changed to compressing controllers, as much I know, SandForce controllers which have a mixed reputation, as much I remember. But it looks, that Samsung is not better.

The latest EVO firmware have this issue as well, so it's probably a bug in their shared codebase for the controllers.

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