[kwlug-disc] Samsung EVO disappointment

[Paul Nijjar]

Earlier this year I decided to finally enter the 21st century and get
an SSD for my netbook. I am paranoid about my data and so opted to
spend more money than strictly necessary for reliability, and decided
upon a Samsung 870 EVO. My impression at the time is that the Samsung
drives had good performance and excellent reliability.

Thanks to an overheating mishap I had to swap my SSD into another
netbook, and I got hit by this bug: 

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201693

It appears that modern Samsung SSD drives (the 860 and later for
certain) don't play well with SATA controllers. In particular they
have problems with the NCQ Trim command. Furthermore, on AMD SATA
controllers they don't work well with NCQ commands at all, to the
point where the only reliable fix is to disable NCQ for these drives
in /etc/default/grub . 

What a disappointment. I spent extra money in the hopes I would get a
more reliable product, and it appears those hopes were incorrect. To
be fair, I have not measured the performance degradation and I do not
know whether it will matter much for my use case, but I am still
disappointed. I continue to hope that my data will stay safe, however.

- Paul

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