Samsung 470 SSD Series Thread

Geez Feez! You sound like a bright one

What if it's a misconception that it is the BIOS that's doing the restricting and it be the registry.... I am going diving my friend

 

You will have no negative performance to speak of without having IRST installed. If you have the SSD running better than before, I would leave it well enough alone. I'm pretty jealous now!

 

I just found something very interesting. I have an Intel G2 80Gb SSD on my other Toughbook, with the same IRST installed on it. The Registry is different than the one with the 470 in it.
This is the Registry with the 470:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE_SYSTEM_CURRENTCONTROLSET_SERVICES_IaStor
Enum
Parameters

This is the Registry with the Intel SSD:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE_SYSTEM_CURRENTCONTROLSET_SERVICES_IaStor
Enum
Parameters
*Folder*
Port0
Port1
Port2
All the entries under each Port are exactly the same.

I do not have the other Folder under Parameters with the 470, it's empty.

Here are some screen shots. BTW, my LPM, LPMDSTATE are at a Default 1. The LPMSTATE is at 0.

I have no LPM's at all on the 470 machine??

 

I have no LPM's either,,,if its a bios limitation like the famous Int13,,where overlays had to be employed to run drives over a certain size,,only a bios flashup can correct it, I purchased a bios chip that was to circumvent this limitation,,it did not work,,I contacted the motherboard company and they were good enough to send me a bios flash up that fixed the problem thru email, so I could run the drive on one partition full size,,instead of many small ones, Tyan company. I have a feeling that even if we repair where the problem is in windows 7,,that the bios would install the same limitation of SATA 150 again on reboot.Either a new bios chip would have to be installed or a flashup of the bios to negate this SATA 150 cap, between the SSD and the ICH9M and let them "handshake" and thus agree to SATA 300.
Lenovo T61's had this same problem and there is much said about this in posts on this site.

One further note,,The ICH9M handshakes with my dvd/cd(read/writer) and the DVD drive is set to SATA 150,The ICH9M handshakes with the Samsung 470 SSD 64Gb and the SSD is set at SATA 300, so, the ICH9M definately can run SATA 150 and SATA 300 on different hardware devices depending upon the hardware device signaling its SATA 150 or SATA 300 to the ICH9M. Originally,,my primary drive was SATA 150, then I upgraded to Seagate Momentus 7200.4 SATA300( fastest drive for laptops hands down) and upgraded again to Samsung 470 series SATA 300, The ICH9M performs as described in Intel specifications-SATA 150 and SATA 300 compatible,,although Intel says voltage is a little higher on SATA 150 than is required by SATA specifications,no drive problems though-just voltage better than minimum specs by a little,ect,ect,see ICH9M pdf file I referenced earlier.

The Samsung 470 Series 64,128 256GB is SATA II(300) SSD,,so no problems there.

Cheers
3Fees

 

All this really sucks if you ask me

I did not call Toughbook yesterday. I was in too good of a mood and if I heard what I think I would have, I would have said some things that I would later regret....I have a pretty good relationship with a couple of the guys in the tech dept.

On the other TB that has the Intel SSD, I set all the LPM's to 0. I do not see a difference nor does any benchmarking. This TB has the Intel(R) ICH8M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller. I wonder if it's the controller or the Intel drive that makes the change or difference that you and I are seeing in the Registry? However, this TB is classified as a MK2, the TB with the Samsung is a MK3. Meaning the MK3 is the last/latest CF-30 series they made up until last year. They are on CF-31 series now. Anyhow, my MK2 has always been snappier, boots in 17 seconds from the start button to having wifi signal. That is how I measure my boot time. I used to have a Patriot SSD in my MK2 that was 64Gb in size, it was one of the 1st one's I bought about 3 years ago. That freakin SSD will fly in that MK2. It's just not big enough. It's faster than my Intel SLC SSD-E!

I have one of the Seagate's you mentioned above. I wanted a HDD that was of some size. I wasn't going to drop 1K on a SSD for 320GB at the time
You are the 4th person to tell me that they love it. Mine does not seem to be any different than the original Hitachi HDD's that came in my TB's. I just can't see a difference. I'm starting to wonder if I have bad one

My SSD or HDD sit in what's called a caddy. It slides in and out on the right side of my laptop. They are made of some type of steel but yet it's very light and of course very strong. I can stand on it with a mechanical HDD in it without doing any harm. The drive sits in a pad/gel type material with a very thin circuit board type heater that goes around the drive. It will activate at a certain temp so that the bearings in a HDD will work in very extreme low temps. I have 4 of these caddies, if I remove all power to my laptop I can just pull it out, slide in another one with whatever OS, SSD, or HDD in it and boot to another OS if I wanted. It's a great feature. Now you know why I have so many HDD/SSD's The best part is that MS pulls the OS key from the MB so I don't have to worry about any of that crap. Although I am a member of Technet which gives me access to any MS product.

Back to the SATA 1.5, I was thinking/wondering if the .inf file from Panasonic that I install 1st when doing a clean install is what could be telling the BIOS what to do. Since I have installed a totally different Intel .inf file I don't think that can be the case unless it's not changing a certain trigger? The next time I load a new OS I am not going to install there .inf file and see what happens.

Sorry for the rambling. Just my mood this morning I guess!

 

"Any Santa Rosa/Montevina Plaform notebook, with AHCI enabled is SATA-300 compliant. The ICH7M was limited to SATA-150, but the ICH8 and ICH9 Mobile Versions are SATA-300 compliant. The ICH8(-R) Desktop Controller in the NP9262 is SATA-300 compliant and is a powerful, beast of a notebook. "

http://forum.notebookreview.com/wha...ead-sata-300-required-laptops-sata-300-a.html

Someone limited ICH8 and 9 to SATA 150,,someone at Panasonic can certainty take this "CAP" out,,I think its a bios condition and the bios needs to be flashed up or changed out by Panasonic..If you could do a "clean install" with WIn 7 retail disk and license to repair this problem,,I believe they would have said do this,if they knew.

Keep us in the loop of what panasonic is going to do to repair this problem. If panasonic will not staightened this out so that you get what you paid for, there are United States Agencies that deal with these problems. This type of problem you have concerns all of us consumers,,we simply want what we paid for nothing more nothing less. For the amount of support you toughbook people have spent on panasonic,,I dont undertand why they have not rolled out the red carpet for all of you people and said they make this right immediately, Be patient with Panasonic tech support,,hopefully this will get the job done,,if not other options listed will help.

I had a problem with Vista(oem) preinstalled,,it was having serious problems,,I contacted Microsoft technical support,, they reviewed the logs I sent and they sent me Vista SP2 32 and 64bit disks to solve the problem,,it worked,I clean installed out of the problem ,I had a Vista retail disk license and then bought a win 7 retail disk set and license, I switched from 32 bit to 64 bit op sys,,no more problems.....The way the manufacturers agent installed vista was giving vista a tough time and errors where abundant and could not be solved except thru a clean install.. ,,Contact Microsoft technical support,,they may have insight on whats going on,,at least they will know if windows copy is problematic by other programs installed by the oem. Any 3rd party drivers that are installed into Windows 7 driver catalog or database, have to meet certain Microsoft requirements to work,,this also includes BIOS drivers,,Windows 7 is suppose to power manage by the rules of acpi, not something else. 3rd party People put all kinds of things in Windows some good some not. Maybe a retail install of windows 7 will get the job done,,this Microsoft tech support can find out,,I used the free email tech support for Vista problems,it worked!!!!!!!,, ,,Windows 7 has the same free technical support, ,,when OEM's started using volume licensing for Windows installs and not sending the windows disk with it,,enormous problems have occured... ,, Windows 7 is having a problem doing power management for your ssd's, Get microsoft technical support in on this...like now,yesterday,,immediately,,
,,Microsoft will probably insist that power management be returned to windows 7 domain as written by Microsoft for all ssd's,sata 2 ,sata 1,ect,it manages.

Another help is too contact JEDEC, ,Panasonic is a member of JEDEC, so is the US ARMY-Senior Member.
Another help is contact SATA Standards organization, ,let them get steamed under the collar about sata "caps", I find no sata standards where this is authorized.
http://www.sata-io.org/
Another help is contact Intel(r), ,ICH9M is enabled to handshake automatically at SATA 150 or 300,,not just 150, its in there specifications( see pdf referenced earlier)
You toughbook people and other effected have all SATA 300 manufacturers,,behind you in this, they want to sell them.......
Cheers
3Fees

 

Hi,
I'm thinking of replaceing my HDD with SSD, and the Samsung 470 128Gb is a possible choice. But after reading this in a review on newegg, I'm not so sure.
"The firmware update procedure is incredibly unfriendly. They require a bootable USB thumb drive but the update utility and Windows are incapable of creating one."
My Asus G51Jx has no BIOS option for booting from an USB stick (it's really true)
Other reviews on this SSD indicates that Samsung must improve on these utilities.
Is this SSD not the right one for me?

 

Samsung changed the way you upgrade the FW with the last FW release. It is easy as pie now. It's as easy as burning an iso onto a disk and booting up. It's very easy now.

In regards to anything else about the 470, it is as stable, effiecent, etc as any of my Intel SSD's. My problem is not the fault of the SSD, it's the hardware in my laptop. I can't get any of SSD's to run the speed they were designed to.

I would not hesitate to buy another 470 at all. The one thing I really like is they release new FW updates pretty often. I have mine for about 6 months and I am on the 4th release. That shows me that they are continuing to improve and make the drive even better after it's release. There are ALOT of SSD makers that do not do this, believe me, I own more than several SSD's of different makes. If there is one SSD I would stay away from is either a Corsair, which uses the Sandforce controller, or any other SF drive. I have a Corsair F-Series and it blows. The Corsair forums are full of people with problems of BSOD, very slow boots, etc.

I don't think I will ever buy anything else besides Intel or Samsung from here on out. That's just my opinion of course. Just don't let the FW upgrade sway your thoughts. It has all changed.

 

@Toyo,
thank you for your quick reply.
What Intel SSD do you got, and compared to the 470, how do you rate them?
Is this statement "Firmware flash wipes the drive" still valid for the Samsung 470?
I know more interesting things in life than doing OS clean installs.

 

Of my Intel's I have a 32GB E-Extreme SLC, and a X-25M 80GB G2 SSD. Intel is known for it's reliability and proven technology. The laptop that has the 80GB drive operates exactly the same every day in any environment, number of programs running, etc. It is so freak-in consistent, just as my 470 is.

I believe one of the best thing that helps the 470 be a very reliable, dependable drive is that they manufacture every piece of the SSD in-house. This type of manufacturing process increases the reliability of the product ten fold. They are able to design, control, make changes easier and faster than out-sourced parts. This is a large contributing factor of what makes the Toughbook line of laptops so dependable. I'm not being biased either, I have seen a lot of 2nd party reports that prove the extreme low failure rate.

The new FW is non destructible. This was a huge improvement, and was very disappointing for me when I found out it was before so. I did the least amount of research before I got the 470 than my other SSD purchases. I have since learned so much from reading and other helpful owners such as 3Fees. He really knows his stuff in a very wide range of things.

Don't hesitate to ask anything more

 

I've got a question regarding the firmware update: I am currently running AXM0701Q on my Samsung 470. When I update this one to AXM09B1Q, will all data be erased or is this one of the fw versions where the data is kept?

 

Nice,
trying to download some guides in PDF-format from the Samsung downloadcenter, but loading these seems harder than getting into Fort Knox
I'm thinking of the guides regarding the latest firmware AXM09B1Q.

 

This is from the Samsung Firmware website Samsung

To prevent any potential damage from the SSD initialization and partial or entire data loss during the firmware update, it is highly recommended that users back up (save a copy of) all data stored on the Samsung SSD to other storage devices before executing the Samsung Firmware Utility.
(Note, Firmware update from AXM07B1Q and AXM08B1Q to AXM09B1Q doesn''t erase your data on SSD.)

 

Download the Magician Device(Install) (Software) (ver.1.2) from
Samsung
and install it without running it. In the install folder you can find the needed pdf documents.

 

I knew this, that's why I asked

That was the info I was looking for - thanks!

 

Update: I just updated the firmware from AXM0701Q to AXM09B1Q without any loss of data!

 

@Toyo

I've installed the Samsung Magician 1.2 now, just for checking out the software, but I'm not able to see any other method than the USB boot trap for upgrading the firmware.
Where did I miss the burning of ISO to CD?

 

You could try to burn the files which are written to the USB device on a bootable CD.

 

Yes, I could try that, but as Toyo confirmed earlier in this thread;
"Samsung changed the way you upgrade the FW with the last FW release. It is easy as pie now. It's as easy as burning an iso onto a disk and booting up. It's very easy now. "

IMO this is not a change of way, so are there other opinions about this point?

 

Should be mentioned here too:
Samsung 470 Series 256GB SSD - Long Term Test Results - Samsung 470 - Where We Started - Legit Reviews

 

that's nice to hear

 

Toyo:
The additional help I mentioned,,US Customs and Immigration,,the US Customs side and Federal Trade Commission-there field agents, ,they dont like companies not mentioning that the laptop is sata 1 limited and not telling you all of this,,They can help this is part of there job that your happy with foreign and domestic purchases and got what you paid for.... ,,I dont believe they declared this limitation on the mainfest when it came thru US Customs and into US Interstate Commerce,Golly,,I have looked up dozens of items in the unified tarriff act before I ordered them,,I have never seen any limitations on any of thousands of items it mentions, the ones I got are all mentioned in the favorite nations treaty status,,tariff exempt....electronic equipment,athletic equipment,ect....

Cheers
3Fees

 

I contacted Panasonic Tech Support over the weekend. There reply was that my laptop is not SATA 3.0 but he sent me a link to the Toshiba site that shows the SSD that Panasonic installs as OEM. He pointed out that it is SATA 3.0. I replied back that just because the SSD is 3.0 does not mean the computer will support it. Basically the way I am reading his reply he his looking at the SSD specs and not the computer's ability. I asked him to please find out why they decided to cripple these machines and what can be done to correct it. I told him that the hardware they installed is 100% capable of doing SATA 3.0 and nowhere does it state in there documentation about the SATA specifics. I am to believe that by looking at the hardware they do list, that according to Intel it should.

He said he is going to look into this deeper and get back to me. I am afraid, or confiedent he is just going to come back to me and say it's SATA 1.5 and that's it. I'm trying to decide what my next step should be. Should I climb higher on the ladder with Panasonic or go to other sources?

 

Oh!!! Its not SATA 1.5-3.0 complaint,,,I hope they repair it under warranty as an honest company would do.

Good news,,I found the shortcut complaint to US Customs and used it.

CBP.gov - home page

click questions/complaints

click report illegal activity link

fill it out and under:

Message (include all details such as Who, What, Where and When)

copy this website posting into it and write down the serial numbers of your toughbooks effected by this sata 1 cap and tell them what you have done to try and get this problem repaired,,ect,,,hit submit and a case number will be issued, then if they dont contact you,,call them and post here and say what your progress is,,put down the case number it will be like this :
#110601-000968,,I will contact some people I met in US Customs,,they will see to it,,I got called by a female from US Customs when I had a problem to acknowledge they seen it and by a Chief Inspector of Homeland Security,,they take defective goods of any kind being imported to the United States Seriously,,I'm sorry Panasonic put you all thru this,,I dont agree with it and as a consumer,,I expect companies to be honest and give customers what they paid for.

Heres a link to the Federal Trade Commission,

https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/


Cheers
3Fees

 

Ok, Here's the scoop. I just recieved a call from the Field Manager for my area. Basically the reason they "Throttle" them back down is all power related. We all know that the more power you create the more heat that is generated. In order for them to be reliable, and withstand the extreme temps that they are subjected to they had to lower the I/O output.
He did say that the 31 IS SATA II but yet again it is limited to some capacity. We had a long talk about the new 53 and it's power and useage as well. Later when I have more time I will explain it all.

He was a very nice guy, and said he fully understands where my concerns and questions are coming from. When the SSD was 1st available in the 31 series they had an onslaught of these concerns. He mentioned that they should put out a memo in the FAQ section in regards to this.

So, my answer, curiosity, madness was all explained and makes perfect sense now.

This is not what I was looking for, but at least I was able to get my answer.

 

I updated from version 7 to 9 and it didn't erase my data.

 

I'm glad to hear that. That was a great feature they added with the last FW update.

 

Interesting toyo,,on my laptop Windows 7 powers down my processor,my screen and any power manageable device rapidly and powers them up as load comes on rapidly..My laptop is much cooler since I changed it to an SSD from a HDD and my battery life nearly doubled. Windows 7 default is best at power management.

Cheers
3Fees

 

I'm glad Samsung made maintenance on these 470 SSD's better..

Cheers
3Fees

 

What do you mean by W7 Default power is best? Are you talking about the Power Plan's that you can adjust?

 

Does anyone have valid PDF files with the Samsung Magician 1.2 software manual and the Samsung Firmware Update User Manual (ver.AXM09B1Q) that they could make available? The PDF files for these on the Samsung web site in support/downloads section are currently corrupt and unopenable, at least by me using two different laptops and trying both Adobe Reader and Google Chrome to open them.

Thanks!

 

I too tried downloading the pdf's from the link you gave - not valid pdf's...

Hope someone has them previously downloaded and can upload them for you.

Good luck.

 

Yeah, I hope someone has them and can upload them too. I emailed Samsung (both support and their webmaster) to let them know the files are bad but so far no reply.

 

Download the magician software and install it. The pdf files are included in the install folder.

 

Hello everyone. I recently purchased a samsung 256 SSD OEM. I believe it's dell. The specs are as follows:

Firmware - AXM06D1Q (Supports Trim Under Windows 7)
Model - MZ5PA256HMDR-010D1
Dell P/N 04K2C3

As it's OEM, is it recommended and safe to use to firmware provided by samsung OR do I have to use dell specific firmware? If the latter is true, there are two different firmwares for the samsung SSD on the dell website, so which one do I use? Cheers!

 

The Samsung firmware does not install on OEM. You have to use the firmware of the OEM.
Are you sure that Dell already delivers new firmware for the PM810/470 series?

 

I don't think they do, as the ones I downloaded were for the PM800.

 

hi, where you able to update the firmware on your Dell OEM? I'm looking at getting one off ebay myself.

Also, if you still have the drive do you mind checking and letting me know if the holes for the screws on the side of the ssd is actually part of the top cover or bottom cover (bottom cover being the side with the serial number stick on it)?

I plan on using the drive on a Thinkpad X220 and according to another user with the Retail version of the 470 you can simply remove the top orange cover to fit it into the X220. However, through my research I'm aware that the plastic body of the OEM and Retail version is different.

Many thanks in advance.

Nick

 

Has anyone tried to update the firmware and get a "no supported ssd(s) found" message during detection?

Trying to update Samsung 470 SSD 64GB firmware from AXM0501Q to AXM09B1Q using the May 8 Samsung SSD Magician ver 1.2 and I always get the above message.

Tried: 4 different computers, on board mb controllers (intel and marvell) and PCIe controllers (also marvell 9128 based), combinations of ACHI / IDE-ATA / Legacy drive modes, external USB enclosure, different SATA ports, 0, 1, 2, 3. Moved on to try different USB sticks, front and back USB ports, and different computers altogether.

On one machine I get the error: Load Driver returned error= 16395 after I press "Y" to start the process before drive detection.

Let me know if there's anything else I should try. Thanks!

 

gxmikey, do you have any specific issue with the current firmware? If not I would not recommend upgrading the firmware.

On Newegg there are some complaints about updating the firmware, perhaps there is more information there.

 

gxmikey, with the Samsung Magician you can only update the firmware of original Samsung SSDs.(Those with the orange corner).

Following is an excerpt from Samsung support website:

Q 01.
How do I get a support for F/W update on OEM drives?
A 01.

Please contact your PC manufacturer's support center for further assistance. Samsung isn't liable to provide support on OEM drives due to OEM policy.

 

Hey not sure if my samsun 470 has good read/write speeds.
i have the 128gb

if anyone can tell me how to improve all the things that would be awesome.

 

maximinimaus: it's a retail drive with the orange corner, not an OEM (MZ-5PA064).

phil: random freezing (no bsod just a freeze), removed all the components to debug, ram, memtest, going to 1 stick, replaced vid card and usb components, the only things that remain to test are the mobo and ssd. the firmware being 4 revisions behind worries me.

just checked newegg's reviews (all 3 sizes), found most people complaining about creating a usb bootable drive which isn't a problem anymore due to the new magician, and found one person with what sounds like the same problem as mine who ended up RMAing the drive.

thanks for checking all.

 

I had the same problem with freezing Windows 7 (Samsung PM810 256GB - Dell OEM on Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with SATAII moded BIOS). Try this solution for C300 - disable LPM feature in Intel Rapid Storage. It works on my notebook!!! Now I don't have any problems with freezing Winodws...

 

I have a genuine Samsung PM810 128GB running WIN7 on my X61 with Middleton modified BIOS for a couples of day. I am using the built-in MSACHI driver and so far there is no issue. The exactly same computer and software have been running on the PM800 SSD (MMCRE28G) perfectly for a couple of months. I've just ghosted the whole Win7 over to the newer SSD.
FYI, the last Intel RST/ACHI driver certified by Lenovo for these machine is the 8.9.2.1002 which was released in 2009. Unless Lenovo release a newer version I would rather stick with the Win7 built-in driver.
[Edit: It seems I don't need to wait, Lenovo has newer 10.1.0.1008 Intel driver but not for the older X61, so I may just have to bite the bullet and try it.]

 

HP offers Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver 8.9.8.1005 (22 Jun 2010) for my HP 8530w.
I'm running Intel Rapid Storage Driver 10.6.0.1002 without any issues.

 

Samsung now offers version 2.0 of the Magician software for download at

Samsung (Software)

2. Improvements & Modifications
- Added 4 new featrues : Over Provisioning, Secure Erase, OS Optimization, Disk Clone
- Updated System Information and Site link feature
- Application GUI modified

3. OS
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

4. Applicable Model
MZ-5PA256B
MZ-5PA128B
MZ-5PA064B
MZ-5PA256C
MZ-5PA128C
MZ-5PA064C
MZ-5PA256
MZ-5PA128
MZ-5PA064

 

Magician is reporting that I'm running in non AHCI mode. I don't believe that's correct though because it's enabled in BIOS and I'm using the latest Intel RST drivers. Plus, Device Manager shows that I'm using the Intel SATA AHCI controller. Bug in Magician? Anyone else seeing this?

 

Thanks 3Fees for the heads up! I don't have my Magician starting up when I boot so I was not notified. I was just on Sammy's website over the weekend searching for anything new I did stumble upon the new 470 drives with the misc software package.

 

Running the Magician 2.0 in the OS Optimization does yours state that the system should boot in AHCI Mode? I can't really tell if this is a statement or if it's trying to tell me something. It is not very clear understanding.