Samsung releases new fix and firmware update for SSD 840 Evo drives

If you own a Samsung SSD 840 Evo drive and noticed that write performance went considerably down after some time, you may want to download an updated tool and install a new firmware from Samsung that according to the company should resolve the issue.

 

The company's Samsung Magician Software was updated to version 4.6 recently. The software, offered on Samsung's official support website, is provided for Windows at the time of writing.

Before you head over to start the download note that there is a catch: the download is limited currently. It is unclear why Samsung decided to limit downloads until April 27, 2015 but if you try to download it right now you will get an apologetic message stating that the download is currently not available.

Good news is that third-party sites such as Major Geeks are hosting the same version so that you can download Samsung's Magician Software 4.6 from those sites instead.

Another issue that you may encounter currently when running the software is that the new firmware is not detected by it.

The new firmware EXT0DB6Q includes a periodic refresh feature which should resolve the slow performance issue.

The performance issue affects old data on Samsung 840 Evo Solid State Drives. The company released a patch half a year ago that seemed to fix the issue at first but did not in the long run as performance drops crept back in after a while.

The patch back then moved files around on the device to resolve performance issues. The new patch seems to do that regularly while the drive is idle to make sure that old data performance stays on a high level.

It needs to be noted that this only works if the drives are powered on regularly and not if they are not powered on for longer periods of time.

The updates are not yet available for Linux or Mac systems.

Samsung users who cannot download and use the software or don't get support for their drives (it appears Samsung 840 Basic users don't) may want to check out Disk Fresh, a free program that moves data around on devices without affecting it. It should have the same effect as Samsung's solution.

To test whether your drive is affected download and run HD Tach. The program, unlike other benchmarks, tests the performance using existing data on the drive which reveals the issue. Other benchmarks write new data to the disk for tests which does not.