CAUTION for the S.M.A.R.T Cleared SM961 drives!

As you may have noticed there has been a lot of 1TB/ 521GB SM961s on feebay recently.

Threads on Chinese forums have already indicated that it is possible to clear the SMART data of SATA Samsung drives, and recently the NVME ones have fallen.
https://www.chiphell.com/thread-1956734-1-5.html

As a Chinese myself I'm really disappointed by this. And I hope to spread this info as much as possible to make those dishonest people regret doing so.

[/strike]Currently for SATA they cannot clear B1 (Wear Level Count) data, and that's the only way which you can tell if the drive has been cleared or not.[/strike]

Please feel free to share


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some clarifications and updates:

1. As for SM961, there's no way to see decisive evidence as of now (05/2019). Unlike SATA drives there's no B1 bug.
2. There has been cases reported of conflicting SN date/ manufactured date or SN on sticker/SN as displayed in CDI. Which can be used as indirect evidence.
3. No mark on connecting finger does NOT imply being new! Also a new drive can have marks on connecting finger during manufacturer testing or if iy's removed from new system
4. sm963 is also not safe (surprising I haven't seen any of these on feebay)

Per request from seller.
The SM961 I received from seller b_n_b was manufactured around 2018 week 40 and contains no conflicting informations found on label, PCB, controller, cache and NAND chips.

I cannot promise about the exact condition. All I can say is that for a drive manufactured in 1840 even if it's tampered it's very unlikely to have been written a few hundred TBs of data.

I am NOT implying about the exact condition of the drive. And I CANNOT promise anything regarding the future stocks of any seller.

The Generic version of SM961 ceased production in around March last year while the HP SM961s continued to around October.

=======================================================
Personal recommendations, so far:
1. Avoid seller from China
2. Avoid early batches manufactured during or before 2017 Q1

 

Very interesting... I was wondering myself why all the sales recently... I did pick up two of them for giggles and am running them in RAID, again for fun...

I'll keep an eye on it...

 

whats the wear leveling count on those drives?

chinese are clever indeed

edit: lol, seriously? this post was edited because "this language isn't needed"?

A small side note to the Mod who probably saw some kinda "racist" connection here: i actually LIVE and WORK in friggin Singapore. By choice. Who do you think comprises 75% of the population? That´s right, Chinese! Think about that for a moment

 

It's the item B1 of S.M.A.R.T. Personally I don't mind buying second handed drives. The worst one I have ever came across had ~560 P/Es. And even with that it has more life remaining (*in theory*) than those TLC drives with fancy packaging and 3 year warranty. But what I absolutely hate is lies, really. It feel like being cheated into a marriage with a girl like Paris Hilton.

Yeah Chinese are clever, we know that from the BGA to PGA/LGA i7 4980HQ and also the infamous LGA771->775 sticker, and multiple other things. But some times they used that wisdom on bad things such as refurbishments and fakes.

Facts always matters more to me than words. And some of the most disgusting lies are packed with the most elegant languages. From moderator's point of view there's the need to create a "friendly environment". And no surprising I might have got special attention from mods cause I have been trying to speak sarcasm as fluently as my first language. (Possibly still a long way there)

 

Mightily insane the amount of mods that have been accomplished by them.

 

Aren't factory refurbished drives given the same treatment?
I'd say Commendable job by the Chinese developer who developed the tool and unfortunately consumers have to double check everything just to be sure. End result is people become smarter in the end. Consumers will get to know which drives are genuine or fake and at the same time developers will look to make refurb products better than genuine. Its a double edged that hurts both attacker and defender at the same time.

 

Bless you for your valuable authoritative opinion! Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom!

 

Certainly not! Some countries have large or heavy import duty so a 1TB Samsung 970 Pro costs close to 500-600$ so buying a used MLC SSD with warranty intact seems very wise.

 

word.

Sent from my Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (Oxygen) using Tapatalk

 

Yeah but for factory refurbishment you've got a "certified refurbished" sticker.
In economy there's a term called "lemon market", which describes the phenomon of "bad money drives out the good" when there's information inequality. In the end there will be only "lemons" in the market. Actually as of now almost no one in China buy RAMs/SSDs/HDDs from taobao.

Personally I think what will happen is, the price of SM961 will crash to the bottom. And they can't even sell refurbished drives at perhaps 3/4 of the price which second-handed drives used to have. Most buyers will end up spending 30%-50% more.

Who will win from whis? Maybe Samsung or other TLC manufacturer?

 

Which word did I make a mistake?

 

:thinking:

A. If you have read the terms and conditions of manufacturers, you will immediately realize that the warranties are pretty much useless.
a1. NONE, NONE of the manufaturer cover the data loss during the warranty period.
a2. If you have a potato drive, how likely will you get similar level of coverage? More likely you will just receive a "Refurbished" product. I've also seem posts saying about receiving a 710 as replacement for X25-E before.

That's said, the value of the warranty is CAPPED at the economic value of the drive itself. It should never be overpriced. I can't see how a $200 960evo can compare to a $175 sm961., even if the SM961 have had 100 P/Es. Like really, the only reason I can think of about buying 960evo is when you have only one PC and are extremely risk averse.

I have had ~30 second handed SSDs, and only one is dodgy (which is the buggy Cruicial M4). When you have big enough sample size then the OEM /2nd handed drives should not be a problem.

But that's all before these SMART tempering thing came out. I don't agree with not buying the 2nd handed drives (if their exact condition is made known and can't be changed). But I think now we should ignore those SM961s and let this SMART tampering thing bite back to those who did it.

 

My guessing, this:

might make A***** great again. XD

 

no mistake, haha by that i meant "i agree with you 100%".

Sent from my Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (Oxygen) using Tapatalk

 

I edited your post, sorry I haven't seen your comment until today. Let me explain why. The initial post contained inappropriate language and the term was removed. I did not see some sort of racist connection hence your comment was left intact with the expletive removed.

Here are the forum rules:

Foul language isn't necessary to discuss notebooks and help people, so it won't be tolerated. Any attempt to bypass the profanity filters will result in an infraction against the user and that post being edited or removed. Using asterisks or any other symbol to disguise bad language is considered bypassing the filter.

I am always open to PM if you have any other questions.


On a more on topic note, I think it was just a matter of time before this happened. It's always been a big deal when buying used or even "new" drives from less than trustworthy stores. I've purchased "new" 4TB drives from a 3rd party on Newegg that had their smart data cleared. I knew they would be server pulls beforehand so it didn't bother me. I really think the SM961 is a great drive and most of the time it's probably fine since most people don't write enough data to the drives to have the lifespan affected. The problem is you have no idea what the usage was on them. Thankfully SSD prices are dropping like mad. I picked up an Inland Premium from Microcenter for $115 the other day and I have no complaints about that.

 

Justification accepted Always prefer to know who im dealing with and what its all about instead of just being confronted with an anonymous post edit.

Currently looking at used 4TB ssds for sale from reputable sellers and from what i can discern the prices and seller reps are too good to just pass up and ignore. in any case, ill need some more time to cough up the necessary funds so plenty opportunity to keep an eye on developments...

Sent from my Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (Oxygen) using Tapatalk

 

Okay, some clarifications and updates:

1. As for SM961, there's no way to see decisive evidence as of now (05/2019). Unlike SATA drives there's no B1 bug.
2. There has been cases of conflicting SN date/ manufactured date or SN on sticker/SN as displayed in CDI. Which can be used as indirect evidence.
3. No mark on connecting finger does NOT imply being new! Also if the drive is removed from new system there could be marks on connecting finger
4. sm963 is also not safe (surprising I haven't seen any of these on feebay)


Some unconfirmed, (I've seen information but don't have confidence about the reliability, and I think these are not very likely to be accurate):
1. the SMART tampering is done through a bug in the firmware, kinda like when you secure erase the 8MB intel SSD 320 and the SMART is cleared at the same time
2. B1 can be cleared on some SATA drives?
3. There are rumors that the batch of sm961 is from Samsung/OEM inventory.


A few more videos, if you can understand Chinese
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av51071477
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av51573180

 

Posts like this also hurt good sellers. MyDigital Discount has a number of sealed cases and is blowing the drives out to clear inventory. The pricing is really low for MLC SSDs. The value is pretty much unmatched at this time.

I wrote the first SM961 review at Tom's Hardware in 2016 right when the series started shipping in OEM systems and I will have a review on TweakTown in a few days of a low cost VROC array using SM961s. There are only a few NVMe drives on the supported VROC list and this is one of them.

 

Per request from seller.
The SM961 I received from seller b_n_b was manufactured around 2018 week 40 and contains no conflicting informations found on label, controller, cache and NAND chips.

Though I cannot promise about the exact condition. All I can say is that for a drive manufactured in 1840 it's very unlikely to have been writte a few hundred TBs of data. And I am NOT implying that the drive I receive is tampered or not. And I CANNOT promise anything regarding the future stocks of any seller.

The Generic version of SM961 ceased production in around March last year while the HP SM961s continued to around October.

I have updtaed this info in the front page of this thread and will update with more information, hopefully ASAP.