Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
Ars had a piece covering this as well, and I do wonder if there is something going on somewhere else in the Samsung stack, not just the NVMe 900 series line. Pure anecdote, but two years ago I did a NAS for a client using 24x 2TB Samsung 870 Evo drives (they&#x27;d gotten some incentive deal for it). While it was all one type vs mixed, there was the &quot;luxury&quot; of time because at that point getting the system they wanted together had a significant lead time. So I did ensure that the drives were purchased over the course of around 7 months, from multiple different reputable sellers (B&amp;H, CDW, Provantage etc) in separate batches. System was solid, an Epyc 2 based SuperMicro server, running TrueNAS.<p>And then last year with around 5500-7500 quite light hours of runtime (primarily reads, ~0.08 DWPD, well under official rating of 0.3 DWPD) drives started failing. These were definitely real failures, first indication came from regular automated ZFS scrubs and reporting increasing checksum errors and ATA errors. It was for so many drives and I&#x27;d always considered Samsung SSDs relatively reliable (even for consumer ones) that at first I thought it was a SATA controller failure, and our rep agreed and warranties back the server. They were great, gold plated support contracts pay off once in a while, and motherboard replacement and thorough testing later back in service. More drive problems. SMART short tests said everything was healthy, first longs did too. But then drives exceeded error limits and started getting faulted, and at last SMART long tests started failing. Digging in showed worrisome stats. So began swapping out and warrantying drives (cheers to the stress test to TrueNAS, in the end zero downtime or need to restore from backups). In the end, <i>THIRTEEN (13) out of 24 failed</i>. Brutal &gt;50% dead drive rate. I talked to some others around and they&#x27;d seen &lt;1 year rates also at 30-60%. Big :\. Rep also indicated they were hearing more about Samsung failures.<p>Anyway, gave me a talking point going forward to really, really press management on &quot;it&#x27;s worth paying for drives from 3-4x brands and maybe splurging for higher rated vs consumer too&quot;, but also does made me wonder if there is something going on, or was (pandemic related?), at Samsung&#x27;s storage division. It&#x27;s definitely pure anecdote but still, I spread those drive purchases out reasonably hard, and they had radically different serial numbers. Same with other folks I know at other businesses using various Samsung drives, everyone has been going to real effort following decent practices to prevent buying drives all from a single lot. Even 10% failure rate for consumer drives I could have seen, but 54%? And not a bathtub curve all frontloaded in the first month or two but after 7-11 months? That feels high? Samsung did replace them all no questions asked, they paid for shipping too. I don&#x27;t have any global insight into how this all looks and it could be just plain bad luck for all of us in the region, but still.