Samsung will release a new firmware later this month that should solve the persisting performance issues of the 840 EVO SSDs. The Korean electronics giant previously released a fix but that only solved the issue temporarily.
The website PC Perspective tested a beta version of a new EXT0DB6Q firmware that should be released later this month. This firmware update appears to resolve the performance degradation issues by " a periodic refresh feature that can maintain the read performance of this older data".
The information was shared by Samsung in a Q&A with PC Perspective. In the same Q&A Samsung also states that the update does not affect the lifespan of the drive. The company states, "the algorithm does not affect normal user scenarios (i.e. occasional PC performance degradation due to background work of SSD) or the lifespan of an SSD and can actively maintain its performance without the help of Magician. However, this algorithm does not operate when the power is off."
Two months ago Samsung stated it was investigating the persistent issues with the 840 EVO SSDs. In October last year Samsung released a fix that recovered the read performance in the concerned situations but later it became known the performance of the drive degraded again over time.
Since August last year there have been reports that the read speed of 840 EVO SSDs sometimes heavily degrades. Files older than a month are read with speeds between 50 and 60 MB/s while the expected read speed is up to 450MB/s.
