I recently destroyed the hard disk in my new laptop by dropping a guitar capo onto its keyboard during a filk circle. The capo landed on the K key which is more or less right exactly atop the hard disk. Though the computer is protected against gravity drops, that same sensor doesn't help if you directly thwack the disk while it's actively reading or writing data. The head crash was so bad that the BIOS refused to even recognize there was a disk drive present at all, let alone be able to boot it or recover data off of it.

Luckily, I'm religious about backups, and lost only a tiny bit of unimportant work. All my important data was already backed up in multiple locations. But I decided that I wanted to avoid the problem ever happening again. Though I had the option of calling in a replacement Winchester disk on my Sony service plan, instead I just bought a Samsung 840 EVO solid state drive to replace it, so I can feel safer about taking this laptop on the road with me. Works like a charm, I'm very happy with it so far.

I just got done rebuilding the system and getting all my apps and data back to where they belong, and then happened to stumble upon a tech article that mentioned the very disk drive I'd bought. I just went through the relatively painless "fix" process, and I thought there might be some folks here who might have the same disk drive might not have been as lucky as I to have stumbled across the article. So here's the details:

Some folks on the internet had been noticing that the performance of their 840 EVO's started to tank after they'd been up and running for a while. Turns out it's a bug in their firmware which took them a while to address. The bug caused the read performance to tank on old data blocks which hadn't been written in a while.

Samsung has released a utility to fix the issue. Alas it's Windows-only, but they say they'll have a Mac version at the end of October.

To get the fix, click here and look for 'Samsung Performance Restoration'. Run that. You can deinstall it when you're done running it.

That will both update the firmware to so that the problem doesn't continue, and also rewrite all the disk sectors so that if some of the sectors were already problematic due to age, it would fix them too.

One note about this update: The "Samsung Magician" software doesn't know about this update yet. The update puts in a new firmware version, EXT0CB6Q. Prior to running the update, if you happened to have the "Samsung Magician" software installed and you used it to check for new firmware, it would have told you the firmware was fine and was up to date, despite the fact that there's this new update available. That's what it did to me. I suppose they'll need to update the magician too, now, or something. Odd that it didn't know about this update. Not sure why.

Have fun!