Samsung 870 EVO - Beware, certain batches prone to failure!
Mar 04, 2024
This seems to primarily affect drives produced in January/February 2021. For example, i have three 870 EVO 4TB, only one is affected (so far), serial number S6BCNG0R207xxxx from February '21.
This is not an isolated issue, see
That's just one example of such a thread, there's many more on different forums, just google for "870 evo failing" or the like.
Just today, i really started to notice the issue, some files just couldn't be properly read/copied off the drive, no matter what. Explorer aborts with a failure message, other tools the same.
On my affected drive, CrystalDiskmark reports Health 99%, Wear Leveling Count 5, around 12 TB written. Power on count is 273, "Reallocated Sector Count" is on 329, this last one is already a bit worrying. But that's not the main thing. Each time a file cannot be read, "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate" keep rising by a couple dozen or even couple hundred!
I started a while ago with "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate" already at over 600, now i tried to copy my files to a HDD, and i'm at 2000 for each value and counting. Each time i try to read a damaged file, it rises. Some files i'm completely unable to copy, it just can't read a certain part of them from the SSD anymore. For some other files, the count seems to increase a little bit, but they still copy over, suggesting they are partly corrupted now. It's hard to give the total stats of how many percent of files are affected, but it's a serious issue already even if it's less than 10% of the files affected.
I saw one or two files failing to be read from this SSD before, but i thought, maybe they were corrupted in some way and didn't pay it much mind, since the SMART still didn't look too terrible. I know from other SSDs that there can be bad blocks even if they are new, so i didn't worry too much. But now this looks very different, i can't even copy some files anymore.
Check your 870 EVO SSDs for these things:
Elevated "Reallocated Sector Count", "Used Reserve Block" and "Runtime Bad Block" count - first warning sign (my two other 870 EVOs have none).
Non-zero "Uncorrectable Error Count" and "ECC Error Rate", and especially if those two keep rising when you read/write files. Definitely affected then!
You can read out the self-monitoring SMART values of your drives with CrystalDiskInfo.
In there under "Function" -> Advanced Feature -> Raw Values, select "10 [DEC]" to have human-readable values. You can then upload screenshots of the data, press CTRL-S to screenshot in there.
