Kyle Manna

Kyle Manna

Entrepreneur and chip whisperer.

Samsung 840 EVO SSD TRIM Support Blacklisted After Firmware Upgrade

1 minute read

Firmware Upgrade Gone Wrong

A while back I did a firmware upgrade on my Samsung 840 EVO SSD because of potential performance problems with the TLC NAND. I waited for the second release of the firmware and then bit the bullet and went on the Linux upgrade adventure. The adventure didn’t work out so well as I was hit with performance new problems after. Annoyed, I scribbled up this blog post about that.

Someone posted a comment on my earlier blog post and I did some more digging and found that I’m not alone. Ahhh, so I’m not imaging things.

Search for Answers

My drive is now blacklisted as it relates to TRIM support in the kernel with this new little hint:

[    1.056198] ata8.00: disabling queued TRIM support
[    1.056201] ata8.00: ATA-9: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB, EXT0DB6Q, max UDMA/133

The search starts and thanks to Linux and git, the search was finished in a few minutes with this commit:

commit 9a9324d3969678d44b330e1230ad2c8ae67acf81
Author: Martin K. Petersen <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon May 4 12:20:29 2015 -0400

    libata: Blacklist queued TRIM on all Samsung 800-series

    The queued TRIM problems appear to be generic to Samsung's firmware and
    not tied to a particular model. A recent update to the 840 EVO firmware
    introduced the same issue as we saw on 850 Pro.

    Blacklist queued TRIM on all 800-series drives while we work this issue
    with Samsung.

    Reported-by: Günter Waller <[email protected]>
    Reported-by: Sven Köhler <[email protected]>
    Signed-off-by: Martin K. Petersen <[email protected]>
    Cc: [email protected]
    Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <[email protected]>

Welp, that explains it. At least it sounds likes Samsung might be working on an update which of course would mean a third firmware upgrade. That sounds like software trying to fix a hardware problem. Woof. Might be searching for a new SSD if this is this affects data integrity and not just performance.

This patch came along in Linux kernel 4.0.5. Which makes sense since my SSD has been behaving as I’m now running linux-4.0.5-1 ARCH.

Live dangerously my friends, but keep your backups up to date.

Comments