Comment 55 for bug 1449005

I have now sent a second email to Samsung's support, this time being much more detailed about *exactly* why their drive is broken. If they keep coming back with their retarded form-reply again, I will just keep sending it, and will be talking to the two guys mentioned earlier who have direct contacts at Samsung.

Here is the new email (to save time, I copied heavily from my previous post here on this thread so readers will recognize lots of segments):

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My Samsung 850 PRO 500gb drive came shipped with firmware EXM02B6Q from the factory.

This firmware revision includes SATA 3.2 spec features, but they are not properly implemented.

The drive sets "ATA IDENTIFY's" word 77, bit 6 to 1 ("true"), which means "RECEIVE/SEND FPDMA QUEUED supported".

But the firmware does NOT actually support RECV/SEND FPDMA QUEUED, and just wrongly claims that it does. If you try to retrieve "log 13h" the drive errors out, but the spec says that if RECV/SEND FPDMA is supported then log 13h MUST also be supported.

So this is a case of Samsung's firmware department ticking a flag for all the shiny SATA 3.2 features, and not actually making sure they implemented them all.

A secondary problem of you incorrectly setting "ATA IDENTIFY's" word 77, bit 6 to 1 ("true") is that FPDMA QUEUED TRIM *must* ALSO be supported if you do that. But the drive does not support queued trim.

So the false advertisement of ATA IDENTIFY word 77 bit 6, without actually supporting that new feature, means that the drive is severely broken in multiple ways.

Two possible solutions to this situation:
1) A firmware update which sets "ATA IDENTIFY's" word 77, bit 6 to 0 ("FALSE!") instead, to PROPERLY show that the drive does NOT support SATA 3.2 FPDMA QUEUED features.
2) Alternatively, a firmware update which implements FPDMA QUEUED, log 13h, FPDMA QUEUED TRIM, etc, so that the drive actually supports what it *claims* it does.

Of these two, #1 is the easiest and makes the most sense. Either way, there's a problem in the firmware and it needs a fix.

Thank you for your time,

Mark
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