So… I bought a Samsung 860 EVO 500 GB V-DAND SSD, installed it in a desktop PC via a mounting bracket, started using it, and it appeared to be doing fine. But, upon further inspection, I found out that it was having problems. First of all, they appeared to be performance problems. But, upon closer inspection, I saw the drive was having trouble with SATA communication errors. What gives? Searching around on the Internet, I found insight. The Samsung 860 EVO’s SATA controller is not compatible with my particular AMD SATA controller. Samsung has been blaming AMD for having a buggy controller and refusing to make a firmware upgrade on their side to work around the bugs.
So, for many folks, this means returning the Samsung SSD to the retailer they purchased from and replacing it with a different brand name SSD, and this solved the problem. Well, that’s really a bummer. In my case, the choice is between returning and replacing with a different brand or swapping with a Crucial brand SSD I have in a different system that is about the same capacity.
20200120/DuckDuckGo linux ata log page reported inactive tag
20200120/https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/Cameras-IT-Everything-Else/860-EVO-250GB-causing-freezes-on-AMD-system/td-p/575813
Indeed, my lspci output show the following:
00:11.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
So I very likely do have one of the problematic AMD 9xx chipset SATA controllers.
And… my final choice? I decided to do a swap with my existing Crucial drive. This was a real bummer because the newer drive was a few gigabytes smaller than the older one, and that meant I needed to shrink my biggest partition, my XFS partition. Alas, the XFS filesystem doesn’t have good offcially supported tools for shrinking, which meant that I had to create a new XFS filesystem and copy all my files over, via rsync. Bummer… but hey, it worked okay, and all is well. The AMD-based PC is not complaining with the Crucial SSD, and the Intel-based laptop is working fine with the Samsung 860 EVO SSD.