Continuing the discussion from Ubuntu MATE and SSD Drives - Samsung 840 EVO in particular:
Have the previous issues with the Samsung 840 EVO been resolved? Does anyone have experiences with the Samsung 850 EVO running UM 16.04? I am currently in Shanghai and I just bought a Samsung 850 EVO through a Chinese online retailer. Is there any way to identify a counterfeited SSD?
I don’t have a Samsung SSD, so I can’t comment on the issues, but there is a general check for a counterfeited storage drives… be an SD card, SSD or flash drive.
Perform a full zero wipe. One of the grey tactics may involve taking a smaller capacity drive, hack the firmware to fool it’s a higher capacity and then sell it. When the actual capacity is full, it just corrupts and overwrites the beginning again. If it’s too good to be true when you bought it, it probably is.
dd can do this, and it may take a while depending on how large the drive is.
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdXY iflag=nocache oflag=direct bs=4096
(Replace /dev/sdXY with the actual drive)
You’ll know it’s cruft if there are unreadable blocks or the drive capacity is way out of place.
There may be other ways too:
Thanks so much for this info @lah7. In one of the links you provided I came across a short video by Spatry in which he uses the program F3 to test removable media. Can I also execute this program safely on the SSD my UM 16.04 is running on? Does anyone know of a similar utility with a GUI (and if yes, could we get it or F3 into the Software Boutique?)