Comment 57 for bug 1449005

Revision history for this message
Mark Rein (gimpsmart) wrote :

My final attempt at contacting Samsung's braindead support monkeys, this time without any mention of the word "trim", and I decided to lie and say that I'm a hardware controller manufacturer who discovered the flaw to hopefully get the monkey to take notice. Let's see the support monkeys screw this up again - I am SURE they will, as they've repeatedly done so for *every one of us* who has tried contacting them. And if/when that happens, I'll do one last effort and take this up with the two guys above who have direct contacts at Samsung, who can bypass the monkey brigade.

---

I am working on programming a new hardware RAID controller, and one of my test disks is a Samsung 850 PRO 500gb which shipped with firmware EXM02B6Q from the factory.

During my testing, I probe all the drives and discovered that your firmware revision includes SATA 3.2 spec features, but that 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.

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, 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,

Richard