Samsung SSD 840 EVO bug and fix

[Furry.Marsupial]

Have you run BlackMagic to see what it's doing ?

I have a mid 2009 15" Pro with 8Gb RAM and just ( two weeks) put a 500 Gb EVO 840 in it.

I "fixed" the drive while bare on a Win box.. Do you get 200+ write and 260+ read ?

If so you're fine I reckon. Samsung wouldn't have done the fix if there wasn't an issue. My firmware is now EXT0CB6Q. It was BB.

Colin

 

[jkarol3]

Have you run BlackMagic to see what it's doing ?

I have a mid 2009 15" Pro with 8Gb RAM and just ( two weeks) put a 500 Gb EVO 840 in it.

I "fixed" the drive while bare on a Win box.. Do you get 200+ write and 260+ read ?

If so you're fine I reckon. Samsung wouldn't have done the fix if there wasn't an issue. My firmware is now EXT0CB6Q. It was BB.

Colin

I'm getting 490+ write and 510+ read on my 2012 Mini before and after the fix.

 

[yjchua95]

I'm not sure whether this works for starting up from USB or not, but here goes:

Disk Utility, for whatever reason, is prohibited from writing Joliet (ISO 9660) onto MS-DOS FAT 32 Flash Drives, though it should definitely work.

Connect your USB into your Mac.

Download the DOS ISO CD-ROM image.

Open up Terminal.

type diskutil list

Take note of the USB disk you want (usually /dev/disk1)

Then, type diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk1

Then type sudo dd if=path/to/iso/file.iso of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m

Don't forget bs=1m!

The blocksize cannot be any different from this because of the nature of the MS-DOS FAT partition structure. Using smaller block sizes can potentially corrupt the newly created iso and will slow down the process tremendously.

When it's done, reboot from the USB.

 

[johnh57]

AAARGH! -- ETA - Got it.

I have the 840 evo 500 gb. I successfully updated the firmware last fall to the 'C' version. What I had to do then was rename the ISO file to dmg file, burn the .dmg file to the superdrive. Then restart, that worked fine. Disk was empty and it only took a few minutes to do the update.

I tried updating to the current 'd' fix. I can't seem get it. I burned a disk as before with the ISO file renamed to .dmg. Nope. First try it gave me the option of booting from CD on restart - but nothing happened for several minutes. Now that disk is not recognized on restart and finder can't see it after restarting into os/x.

I tried burning the .iso file to the superdrive with a new disk. I.e. I downloaded a new .sio samsung file, inserted a brand new CD_R disk in the superdrive and burned the image. Burn went fine, the image appears fine. The files seem to be there. On restart with the option button held down - no option to boot from CD. It gives me the option of booting from the mac ssd or bootcamp.

I followed the procedure elsewhere on creating a bootable usb. I was able to boot off of the usb - but it just came up in windows 10. All my windows 10 settings everything, I run windows 10 on a virtual machine via parallels. So somehow I booted directly into the VM - I think. Wherever I was, it wasn't in dos command mode. This really confused me.

2010 mbp i5, 500 gb ssd, superdrive, 4tb external usb backup drive (which I ejected and disconnected before restarting), the SSD is in the sata II slot where the original HDD was.


I gave it one more try. Before I burned the disk I converted the .iso file to master boot file using the disk utility which created a .cdr file. Which I burned to the CD-R. That failed.

This morning I tried once more - But I disconnected everything from the MBP - including the USB wireless mouse and the DP to the external monitor. Rebooted into the cd using the .cdr disk .

Update went fine - took all of 10 seconds and it was done. The system report shows the correct version EXTODB6Q.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Just a little update from me, using a 2011 iMac 10.11.4, with a 840 EVO 1TB SSD. Downloaded Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_EXT0DB6Q_Mac.iso today, mounted it in Finder, and burned it to a RW-DVD by right-clicking the mounted image and selecting burn. Selected the DVD in Startup Disk, in System Preferences, and rebooted from the internal Superdrive.

First restart gave me a dark grey screen, and it sat there for an hour with the CPU going hard (Could feel the heat on top of the machine), before I reset it. Then it booted correctly after a few seconds, and installation of the firmware took 5-10 seconds. After that I had to hard reset it, as I had no idea how to restart from the command line ("restart", "/r", "/s" and "shutdown" didn't work). Had to force it into OSX, as it booted to a command line (EFI?) even without the DVD in the machine. About this Mac confirms the correct firmware, EXT0DB6Q.

I will now try the same DVD on a 2009 MBP.

Edit: Do I need to rewrite everything, to get proper speeds, or should everything be fine now?

 

[imorton]

Thanks for the feedback about your "adventure" in updating the firmware.

I no longer have a SuperDrive bay installed, as I put a 2nd SSD in there, so I can see that trying to do all of this firmware updating is not a straight forward (nor easy) update.

I get the feeling that I will stay with EXT0BB0Q instead of taking the chance of screwing up my MB Pro. If it works, don't screw with it.

IAN.