Fix SSD 840 issues with Samsung’s Performance Restoration Software

I replaced a platter-based hard drive in a Thinkpad laptop that I bought with a faster Samsung SSD 840 drive to speed things up significantly.

Samsung acknowledged the existence of a read performance bug in September 2014 and promised to fix the issue by releasing a firmware update for affected Evo models.

The company released the Samsung SSD 840 EVO Performance Restoration tool earlier today which addresses the issue.

The program needs to be installed on the PC the Samsung 840 Solid State Drive is connected to. The installation itself is straightforward and should not pose any issues to users of all experience levels.

The program displays a menu listing all connected Samsung 840 drives and it is up to the user to select one of the listed drives. The selected drive is listed with its serial number, firmware version and storage capacity.

Samsung notes that the drive needs to have at least 10% free storage space for the process to be executed correctly, and that it can take a while for the optimization process to complete.

A click on start runs a firmware check first. The program compares the drive's firmware version with the latest version available and will download and install the firmware on the drive if a newer firmware is available.

A warning message is displayed first though suggesting to backup all data on the drive before proceeding to be on the safe side in case errors occur during the upgrade.

A restart of the PC is required after the update. When you start the Performance Restoration tool after the restart it will automatically start the optimization process. The process is divided into three different steps and a progress bar is displayed at all times to display the status to you.

The optimization process can take quite some time especially if the system is slow or the hard drive is filled with data. It took more than 30 minutes to complete on the Thinkpad's 120 GB Solid State Drive even though 96 Gigabyte were unoccupied at that time.

Samsung 840 EVO owners who are not using Windows seem to be out of luck currently as the Restoration Tool is only available for Windows at the time of writing. A Linux and Mac OS X version will be released at the end of October however.