Solved Samsung EVO 850 crash...

[Cr00zng]

I have a Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB drive for the OS, with Magician software installed, for about two month. The software reports drive health status as good, total bytes written is 0.62 TB.

As of late, it has started to crash hard. The system reboots after the crash, runs for awhile and rinse and repeat. Sometimes runs for days without crashing.

The log entries for these events are non-descriptive:

The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.

There's no memory dump, enabled, since this is a hard crash.

This system dual boots with Windows 7 (Intel SSD), via F12 in the BIOS. In another words, Windows is not used for dual booting. W7 started to have the same issue, hard crash without memory dump. Removing the Samsung SSD seemingly stabilized W7.

Tested the memory, came up clean, nor did it have any issues in W7. Uninstalling/reinstalling Magician software didn't make a difference in the periodic hard crash in W8.1. Shrinking W8.1 "C" partition to 250 GBs seems to resolved the issue, at least for the last couple of hours.

Anyone has an idea how to test SSD drive faults?

The temperature, voltage, etc., of the system seem OK, I don't believe that it could be the source of this issue:

 

[ArazelEternal]

I'm wondering if it isn't an issue with having two different installations of Windows in the same system without using an actual boot loader. The installations aren't aware of each other and one is intermittently writing to the other partition/drive and causing issues.


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[Cr00zng]

I'm wondering if it isn't an issue with having two different installations of Windows in the same system without using an actual boot loader. The installations aren't aware of each other and one is intermittently writing to the other partition/drive and causing issues.


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Anything is possible at this point. I'll disconnect the W7 drive to see, if that fixes this issue.

The system has been running just fine for the last two-three years like this. The W8.1's initial Samsung 256GB Pro SSD had been replaced with the 1 TB SSD about two month ego, the OS restored via Macrium.

Called support and to my surprised I was talking to a tech in less than two minutes. He suggested to do a secure erase that resets the drive to factory settings, among wiping the data. If that didn't fix it, just send the drive in for further testing. The turnaround time is five days, according to him. I just don't feel comfortable to send in the drive with my business data on it and will probably just install new Windows, if it comes to that.

And wouldn't you know, Windows 8.1 has been running for the last five hours without issues...

 

[Itaregid]

A few years ago with my first Samsung SSD based system - that was with W7, I had a bunch of problems (system crashing, system failing to go to sleep, system failing to wake from sleep and more). I finally traced it down Samsung Magician. I uninstalled SM and all my problems went away. I reinstalled SM and the problems returned. So I removed it again and problems went away.

Bottom line, you don't need Samsung Magician. A drive is a drive and Windows knows how to talk to drives just fine. And W8 and W10 know how to manage SSDs just fine too.

This current system runs with two Samsung SSDs (850 Pro and 850 Evo) and no Samsung Magician. I have now decided Samsung Magician is just bloated fluff that wastes system resources.

 

[Cr00zng]

In my case, doing a secure erase and restoring the Macrium Reflect image seemingly resolved the issue. That's probably what the support would've done, if the drive sent in for repair. The system runs just fine without a single crash for over a day now.

Samsung Magician is great for getting the serial number and firmware version for the drive. Other than that, it's pretty much a "gimmick" software with little or no impact to actual performance. The synthetic benchmark numbers do look impressive, but they do not translate in to substantial performance increase.

With that said, my system pretty much behaves the same way with or without Magician installed. The sleep/hibernation features are disabled since Reflect is scheduled to take a daily image backup and shut the PC down. The backup drive is shutdown in the morning and only turned on at night.

 

[Itaregid]

What do you mean by "secure" erase. If you mean you used a "wipe" program, that is not necessary with SSDs as they don't retain "residual" data as "magnetic" disk drives do. With early generation SSDs, running a wipe program is actually detrimental to the drive because of their limited write capabilities. With current generation SSDs, those limits are so high, it is not an issue - except maybe in some file servers or data centers.

I agree that Samsung Magician is "gimmicky" when used with modern versions of Windows. But it can be a useful utility for older operating systems (pre W7) that are not SSD aware.

 

[fireberd]

I have both an EVO 840 and 850. The 840 is for Win 7 and the 850 is for Win 10. I do not do any system tweaking with the Magician. I had my system tweaked for what I wanted as I use it for my recording studio. I tried the Magician tweaks and it screwed up things. I had to manually do my own tweaks again. Checking firmware or updating firmware is about as much as I now do with the Magician.

 

[Cr00zng]

What do you mean by "secure" erase. If you mean you used a "wipe" program, that is not necessary with SSDs as they don't retain "residual" data as "magnetic" disk drives do. With early generation SSDs, running a wipe program is actually detrimental to the drive because of their limited write capabilities. With current generation SSDs, those limits are so high, it is not an issue - except maybe in some file servers or data centers.

It's in the ATA (a.k.a. IDE) standards:

[FONT=&amp]Secure Erase[/FONT][FONT=&amp] (SE). Secure erase is a positive easy-to-use data destroy command, amounting to “electronic data shredding.” [/FONT]

In case of the Full Disk Encryption (FDE) supported SSDs or FDDs, such as the Samsung EVO, the secure erase is done by changing the internal encryption key. When the internal encryption key changed, it effectively renders the data encrypted with the previous encryption key unreadable as plain text. In addition, the secure erase also changes the NAND flash state to "1" to indicate no data and restores original performance. The process is fast, in most cases takes less than a minute.

While it worked in my issue, I am not certain exactly why, but glad it did...

Most people are not aware that the FDE drives store data encrypted since the encryption takes place internally on the drive. In another word, when you buy a new drive nowadays, the chances are that it supports FDE and the data is encrypted that includes the OS. This in itself isn't secure, by default there's no control of who has access to the encryption key. That functionality resides with the BIOS/EUFI by setting drive password, or alternatively a third-party solution. The latter one pretty much relies on the BIOS/EUFI capabilities and in addition, provides a user friendly interface and in some cases, capable to ingrate with domain authentication.

In corporate environment having FDE drives is great, even if it is not used for controlling access to the encryption key. Sanitizing an FDE drive takes less than a minute, as oppose to any other means that can take much longer. The time it takes does not matter much for one drive, regardless of its size. The time does become a factor when a SAN is decommissioned and the drives need to be sanitized. Centrally managing the encryption keys for the SAN does make the sanitizing a breeze. On the flip side, a careless/rogue employee can render the production system broken. You just can't win...:shock:

 

[Itaregid]

Okay, as long as everyone understand FDE is not enabled by default.

 

[Cr00zng]

Okay, as long as everyone understand FDE is not enabled by default.

That is incorrect and everyone should understand, this is hardware based encryption and no action required from the end user...

Drives that support FDE by default are encrypted via AES 256-bit hardware encryption, based on the TCG Opal 2.0 specification. The hardware based encryption secures data without any performance degradation, that includes the OS. The default access to the encryption key is for "Everyone", meaning anyone can access the data on the drive with FDE support.

The FDE can easily integrate into Windows with Microsoft e-drive IEEE1667 to keep your data protected at all times. Or so they say... The integration controls access to the encryption key by providing an authentication method via PIN/password. Bitlocker is actually aware of FDE drive and does encrypt via the software. Bitlocker turns in to managing the access to the hardware based encryption key...

 

[Itaregid]

That is incorrect and everyone should understand, this is hardware based encryption and no action required from the end user...

Sorry, but you are incorrect. FDE is NOT enabled by default on these drives. I have 850 EVOs and 850 Pros on this and other systems here. It is supported by these drive, but it must be enabled manually.

See the Samsung White Paper, Protect Your Privacy, Security & Encryption Basics.

 

[Cr00zng]

Sorry, but you are incorrect. FDE is NOT enabled by default on these drives. I have 850 EVOs and 850 Pros on this and other systems here. It is supported by these drive, but it must be enabled manually.

See the Samsung White Paper, Protect Your Privacy, Security & Encryption Basics.

TL;DR: Apologies, but you do not fully understand how FDE works...

Quote from your referenced link:

Enabling AES Encryption

AES encryption is always active on an 840 or 840 Pro Series SSD*. In order to benefit from the encryption feature, however, the user must enable an ATA password to limit access to the data. Failure to do so will render AES-encryption ineffective – akin to having a safe but leaving the door wide open. To set an ATA password, simply access the BIOS, navigate to the “Security” menu, enable “Password on boot” and set an “HDD Password.”

*-Emphasis mine...

Question...

Which part of "AES encryption is always active on an 840 or 840 Pro Series SSD" you disagree with? And yes, the same applies to the 850 or 850 Pro Series SSD as well. For that matter, to any other FDE drive that supports TCG Opal 2.0 specifications.

Your link clearly states that:

In order to benefit from the encryption feature, however, the user must enable an ATA password to limit access to the data. Failure to do so will render AES-encryption ineffective – akin to having a safe but leaving the door wide open.

In another word, without controlling access to the encryption key, "Everyone" has access to the data, despite the fact that it is encrypted internally in the drive. It's pretty much what I've stated earlier in this thread.

Quote from Samsung:

Secure Data Through Advanced AES 256 Encryption
The 850 EVO comes fortified with the latest hardware-based full disk encryption engine. The AES 256-bit hardware encryption secures data without any performance degradation and complies with TCG Opal 2.0. Easily integrate into Windows with Microsoft e-drive IEEE1667 to keep your data protected at all times.

Weather you know it or not, your 850 series SSDs from Samsung do encrypt the data internally on the drives. You did not need to enable that since the encryption is active within the drive by default. What you would need to enable is the BIOS password in order to prevent anyone else accessing the drive. That would secure the data from unauthorized access, but you did not take that step.

 

[Itaregid]

I do understand how it works but it seems you don't understand that it is NOT enabled by default. From my link and your quote,

In order to benefit from the encryption feature, however, the user must enable an ATA password to limit access to the data.

*-Emphasis mine...

Active is not the same thing as enabled. The light switch on my wall is "active" but the light overhead is not "enabled" until I, the user, flip the switch.

You are suggesting by default users of these SSDs cannot pull the drives and put them in or attach them to another computer and read the data. That is simply false.

 

[Cr00zng]

I do understand how it works but it seems you don't understand that it is NOT enabled by default.

Yes, it is always on and enabled by default...

You are suggesting by default users of these SSDs cannot pull the drives and put them in or attach them to another computer and read the data. That is simply false.

I've never suggested that, read my posts on the matter...

I give up, you just can't comprehend how TCG Opal 2.0 specification based FDEs operate...

 

[Chrysalis]

just a note from me.

Do "not" use the "os optimization" feature in samsung magician, it makes changes that are considered bad practice.
Installing samsung magician will not affect your system on its own unless you utilise that optimization feature or enable the rapid mode (which I would also keep off).

Magician has the following useful functions.

1 - manual trim. (performance optimization)
2 - over provisioning setting
3 - secure erase
4 - viewing drive stats, bytes written and SMART data
5 - benchmark tool with historical data
6 - firmware update, although I wouldnt ever update firmware if existing works fine.