What is Reddit's opinion of Puran Utilities?

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Sounds like you did a cut and paste instead of a copy and paste. I always do copy and paste when it's important, then delete once the copy completes successfully and I can verify the copy works as intended. You can try using this on both drives. I'm not sure if there is a program that can repair files from two halves of them, but I know Windows will just 'lose' files if a cut and paste operation gets ended abruptly, it's happened to me on less important files before many times. Good luck to you. The linked file recovery program is the only free one I've found that has the best success rate of finding deleted files (assuming the drive was writing the data as it was receiving it, if some data was in the drives buffer, those bits will be lost). Most drives will buffer the data then write it once the buffer is full to make writes faster, most buffers are either 32 or 64MB.

As far as getting the drive working without a reformat, try and recover the bits first that are 'corrupted', then try running a filesystem check on the drive to repair the file table. Worse case scenario is you'll have to reformat it, if there are any files on there that aren't backed up, the linked recovery program should be able to recover them.

There's a long, long list of Samsung drives which are afflicted by the slow read bug. It occurs after 9-40 weeks, depending on the namometer production process. For example, a 21nm NAND package's performance decays over 40 weeks. A 19nm TLC NAND package decays after 9 weeks.

Most Ultrabooks use some kind of TLC-based mSATA or ePCI SSD. For example, the Dell XPS 13 has a Samsung PM851 drive. The Lenovo Yoga also has TLC. Unfortunately, Samsung Magician is not compatible with the OEM drives used in Ultrabooks. The only tool I've seen that restores performance is DiskFresh.

EDIT: Samsung's policy regarding this debacle was to claim the drives are OEM and therefore aren't covered under warranty.

I've heard that this tool doesn't fix anything until it detects data read speeds in the 250 MB/s ballpark. Which is absolutely unacceptable in a SSD of this calibar.

I'm not even going to bother with this "fix". Since Samsung botched the first one and then missed their March projection for the release of the second attempt, I've taken things into my own hands.

I run weekly HDTune benchmarks and save the results. Once I see read speeds trending downward below 400 MB/s, I run DiskFresh. It's not a fast program but it surprisingly has very little overhead so it can be run in the background during normal system use. It basically does the same thing that the first Samsung tool did - re-writes the data on the drive resulting in like-new performance. 450 MB/s reads across the whole drive.

Is this a bit of a hassle? Yeah, but it's better than enduring slow boots and load times in the long run. Does it accelerate wear on the drive? Yeah, but SSD's have such longevity that even it loses a year or two off of useful life I'll still be ready to upgrade well before it dies.

There are two (temporary) fixes I know of. The one I mentioned above is what is referenced in the article, it was the first fix released by Samsung, that ended up only temporarily restoring performance, "Samsung SSD 840 EVO Performance Restoration Software" -

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/us/html/support/downloads.html

The second temporary fix would be essentially re-writing every bit of data on the drive (in-place), which in theory gets the performance back to original for a while. You can do this with a program like Disk Fresh -

http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html

Both these are just bandaids, and don't fix the underlying issue that is causing the slowdowns. So, after running either you can expect performance to degrade again just as it has in the past.

Yeah, unfortunately it sounds like your HDD is dead/dying. If you can plug it into another PC and read it, use Puran File Recovery orRoadkil's Unstoppable Copier to get as much off as you can!

This is what I used. Took a while for it to run, couple hours if I recall. From what I understand it rewrites your data on the ssd, although I may be misunderstanding it's function. It works at least. http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html

You can use this to get the most out of your PC for gaming. It comes bundled with a load of tools as well but the Pc gaming tool completely removes elements of your PC not used for gaming to boost your FPS. Ive seen personally and average of around 10fps increase in most games when using the gaming PC profile :)

1. Buy a new SSD.

2. Run software which regularly refreshes data on your SSD so that nothing is more than a couple months old.

The issue is that after data is written to the flash memory cells in the SSD, the voltage of those cells slowly drops over time. After several months, the voltage has dropped enough that the drive has problems reading the data back, and it goes into long read-error-retry loops until finally after a dozen or more attempts to re-read it gets lucky and reads the data correctly. All those retry loops slows down the performance of the drive drastically.

Refreshing the data by re-writing it resets the voltage to high enough levels that the drive has no problems reading it on the first try.

Since we don't know if this is actually the problem your drive is experiencing, the easiest thing to do is to test if refreshing it restores performance to like when the drive was new. Try running this program to re-write every "sector" on your SSD. http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html

If performance improves, then yes you are suffering from the issue. And you can just run DiskFresh again every couple months to prevent the problem from recurring. No need to replace the drive.

If performance does not improve, then you are experiencing a different problem and you can ignore everything I've written. You should probably read through the following link to see if 840 (non-EVO, non-Pro) owners experiencing the problem have come up with other ways to fix it.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1519058/the-we-want-our-840-non-evo-ssd-fixed-also

You can use disk fresh. I used it and it did work on getting the SSD back to normal speed. What it basically does is go through the whole SSD and then refresh all the files as if they were used recently. Gets around the bug as it's an old data issue.

Still bad on Samsungs side but I used this diskfresh when I got sick of waiting. You still need to use it every 30 days though as the bug still comes back. Just thought I would suggest this as it is an alternative.

http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html

Unfortunately there is no restoration tool for the non-evo 840, even though Samsung know it affects that drive also. The good news is there's some freeware called DiskFresh that you can run every few months that will restore performance.

If you mean Puran, it is here. If you mean the file itself, I don't know for sure. It'd be found in the scan and could be named by its memory position or by the old file name you saved it. You'd basically have to sort by file type and then open up all the deleted word docs until you find it.

I wouldn't worry about doing an MD5.

Use this DiskFresh utility to do a Read Only test on the disk -- uncheck the write option. DO NOT rewrite the sectors on an SSD. A straight read on an SSD will be very fast and the drive have guarantee to have properly read it so you don't have to guess if it's done.

http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html

I realise that fixing shortcuts can be tedious, but that's probably what you're gonna have to do.

You can also download a software called FixShortcuts that can automatically (or manually) fix your shortcuts for you.

The only free file recovery program I've ever came across that's easy to use is the one included in Puran Utilities.

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Puran Utilities:

http://www.puransoftware.com/Puran-Utilities.html

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Yes it looks shady and weird but I use it a lot, it's legitimate software that works really well with no bullshit, the defrag in there is great and the file recovery actually works.

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Install that, open it, click the file recovery, select your language, go down to the physical drive that you want to recover files from and select it, then underneath where the checkboxes are, select "deep scan", "full scan", "find lost files", and "scan custom list". Then at the left of the checkboxes click scan.

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Once that finishes select tree view at the bottom, and there should be a separate drop-down for each file type. Be aware they may not have the original names and will be a mess of numbers and/or letters, the best bet you have is to select all of the files of that type and recover them, just tick all the files and click recover at the top, then select a place to put the recovered files. Then after that process finishes you can go through the files one by one to find the ones you're looking for.

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I hope this helps. I've been in the same situation before and this software is the ONLY thing that has worked perfectly and for free.

try Recuva, it's free and works ok. If it doesn't find anything, try Puran File Recovery, also free but a bit old

theres a couple of good file recovery utilties within the puran utilities suite http://www.puransoftware.com/Puran-Utilities.html

which imho are better than recuva. but bear in mind if your downloading and installing to the disk which the files were deleted from then theres a chance the file you want to recover will get overwritten

Gonna be real hard to test systems while they are in use.

Since you are writing so much random data, you might be able to get away with just reading the disk. On NTFS and linux weak blocks get marked so they'll never be used again.

Here is a simple utility which does this: http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html (read only checkbox)

And if you get any really bad reads, the next camera write will force those blocks to reallocate. So watch the reallocation count. When it starts climbing - ditch the disk.

You're kinda rebuilding your aircraft in flight......

Naw, it's the simpler manufacturer test. That disk fill is for serious problems and I sure don't know if it's worth the effort. It's just a tool in case you need it.

That /P switch for Microsoft format is well documented. It simply tests all blogs with different patterns. Again, may be overkill. Useful only to super purists or someone with a serious application. A single pass full format is enough.

Here is a good simple tool for reading blocks. I like it because it doesn't dazzle you with a lot of unnecessary information or some controls which will wipe your data. I recommend you use only the read function. Don't let it "refresh" your drive or eventually you'll likely create a problem. Your PC just isn't perfect - what if it scrambles and writes the wrong information over your good data?

http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html

Can't emphasize enough that disks are really good now. If you catch the rare outliers (like manufacturer mistakes) you really don't face much trouble. The single issue to be aware of is sudden loss of all your data. Just dies. there may be no going back if that happens - unless you have backups.

People do worry about the wrong things. Good luck.

Unless you are willing to go through a whole lotta hassle for little gain to make those yellow lights go away just use this: http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html. It won't make the lights go away - but it will fix any problems you have, and does not inhibit reallocation if your drive should decide that's best.

Don't let it rewrite every block - read only is enough. If you are using Linux, the bad blocks test using the read mode is best. Have it as a menu item on several servers here...and it always pulls out the bad blocks.

Doesn't matter how you read those blocks. Lots of software will read from the OS. Even performing an image backup will do it if it's performed from the host OS. Your are using the OS's own defect management.

Disk drives today are like the star trek machines of 50 yrs ago. Designed to live forever without human intervention (sarc). More seriously, they often come close to this ideal IF people will leave them alone.

Can already see some marketing guy at WD approaching his buddy in engineering...begging for more "blinky lights" so that more customers will throw their drives away early :) Can you imagine how much fun it is to sell things which rarely break? Talk about a career and bonus limiting move ........

Manufacturer's utility Extended test, followed by zero fill, followed by full format.

Likely overkill even if it is good practice. I've never found a bad new drive. Guess it's possible the whole practice is urban legend. Full format might be all you need.

More important perhaps? Just read every block from your OS every six months or so (can't use that faster extended test read here). Your OS will hot swap any weak blocks and mark them as used - so you'll never write to them again.

That Linux bad blocks test is one of the best for this if you're a linux user. Chkdsk works for windows users, but unfortunately can return bad blocks to the pool. This one can be set to just read: http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html (there are many others)

We own Spinrite which can flip blocks multiple times without changing data. I don't recommend it for working disks. Rewriting is likely bad policy.

Just read the disk and be happy.

> I suppose the only safe place to really store long term data is to burn it to disk or magnet tapes.

Maybe I've just been unlucky but I tried to restore data from some 10 year old DVD-R and they all had read errors. Some were even visibly degraded, the colour on the underside had gone blotchy.

They were stored in my lost so maybe they got too hot or cold. Dunno. The old HDs still worked though.

IMHO duplicate your backups across as many types of media as you can afford, and if you have the time run DiskFresh occasionally to rewrite the data on the HDs.

I've got an 840 Evo on an old first gen i3 rig. Running a SATA 2.0 connection I believe. This model use to have issues with speed slowing to a crawl when it had fully written all blocks at least once. This was fixed by a firmware update. Make sure your firmware is up to date and run something like DiskFresh to rewrite the SSD data and hopefully it will sort your problem. Mine was getting similar speed to yours and is now benching 250-300 on both read and write.

What kind of card is it? Have you tried this card with other devices before?

Is it the ODRVM 4k? or 1080p? I'm pretty sure the 1080p version will only take up to 32gb (might be same on 4k). If it's a larger card it may not successfully record footage.

My suggestion is to download a freeware software called Puran File Recovery and use it to scan the memory card. Enable all options for deep scan, deleted files, etc. If it is a memory card issue you may not get much, but I've been able to recover some video on a good card from weeks earlier before (lucky).

Forget about the shitty samsung tool. I have a 840 (non-evo), and run diskfresh every 3 weeks and that keeps speeds reasonable: http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html

And fuck Samsung. Seriously, fuck those guys.

There are other recovery tools like

Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery

Puran File Recovery

Recuva

It will start a new scan. But stopping and checking it now to see if it's working will result in greater time saving if you do it now, rather than after having spent a considerable time on it.

Thisis the link for Puran File Recovery download

http://www.puransoftware.com/PuranFileRecoverySetup.exe

For a temporary (and far from ideal) fix, you can use "Disk Fresh" to rewrite all the data on the disk in-place. This seems to restore full speed from benchmarks I've run. It takes a long time to complete, but better than nothing.

Have you tried running DiskFresh on your 840? http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html

It seemed to restore my 840 evo back to fullspeed. But you will need to re-run it every couple of months, and it will increase the overall wear. I really don't give a shit if it lowers the lifespan on my 840 evo, because I plan on upgrading to something else soon anyways, and maybe using the 840 evo in a media center or my old laptop.

I should have known something was up after watching the commercial for the 840 evo, all the actors act like zombies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3XuhMJQ28

I'd recommend Puran utilities as an alternative, it has tons of great features including a registry cleaner, the best defrag tool, and one of the top free undelete programs available. The only other one I'd recommend is Recuva.

http://www.puransoftware.com/Puran-Utilities-Download.html