Linux patch disables TRIM and NCQ on Samsung 860/870 SSDs

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[Alex5723]

Linux patch disables TRIM and NCQ on Samsung 860/870 SSDs in Intel and AMD systems

NCQ is a technology on SATA that allows the system to optimize queuing and movement of data as per workload for the best performance. TRIM on the other hand allows the drive to intelligently free up space that is no longer determined necessary for the storage device to hold on to, without deleting necessary data. This helps to avoid rewriting in used spaces and it is generally considered a good thing for drive health…

As a result, it may probably be best to avoid all Samsung 800 series SATA SSDs if you’re an active Linux user.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=203475

• This topic was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by Alex5723.

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Alex5723 wrote:

As a result, it may probably be best to avoid all Samsung 800 series SATA SSDs if you’re an active Linux user.

No need to ditch one if you already have it (My desktop has an 840 Pro, the G3 an 850 Evo, and the Swift an 860 Evo)… they fixed the issue. They already had NCQ-Trim blacklisted for the 800 series, but they un-listed it when Samsung claimed their new firmware made the 860 and 870 compatible with NCQ-Trim. The 840 and 850 remain blacklisted, and now the 860 and 870 are

If you are about to buy a new drive for Linux, though, maybe think twice about Samsung. I’ve preferred Samsung SSDs for a while, but my last two are SK Hynix, which hopefully won’t soon have such a headline.

There was a reply to the NeoWin article that gets to the heart of it.

From Rosyna:

The issue is that device controller firmware is lying liars about what they actually support. Their “support” of certain SATA features like NCQ and TRIM are predicated on running on a system that uses the Windows driver model and calls commands in the order and frequency of Windows, hiding firmware bugs. On all non-Windows platforms, those features have to be disabled because they never worked and are too full of bugs.

Has the ring of truth to it. There’s no special reason that SATA commands issued by Linux should be any different than they are in Windows… unless the commands don’t work properly, and have been ‘hacked’ to work on Windows specifically. That’s not supporting the standard.

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I have a Samsung 860 EVO in my old Sony Linux laptop and have been using Trim for years without any problem that I’m aware of.  I have Linux Mint 19.1.  Is this another thing I need to add to my list of worries?

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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They have disabled “queued TRIMs”. TRIM still happens, but in a different way.

If you are using the SSD with no perceived slowdowns then you can happily continue as is.
If you really push the SSD then you may get slowdowns and performance issues. If that happens then a different SSD may be of value.

cheers, Paul

2 users thanked author for this post.

Ascaris, Charlie

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I run Trim manually about once a month –  sudo fstrim -v /    I always get a report that it has trimmed a certain amount of the drive successfully.  The FSTrim came with the Linux Mint 19.1.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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I have Linux Mint 20.1 on a PC(Mini PC) and a Laptop and I just checked and the NVMe/M.2 drive is getting trimmed but any logs for the secondary SATA SSD(Samsung 860 EVO) has never been run. Maybe that is not been turned on for that drive?

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TRIM is still run on a schedule (weekly?) but not during “normal” operations as it is in Windows. Scheduled TRIMs should produce a log entry, manual TRIMs apparently don’t.

cheers, Paul

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