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A perfect example why RAID ain’t backup
Indeed! Fortunately the RAID was also backed-up offsite. But, the entire process was shocking in several ways.
At least Samsung was fairly speedy with the RMAs and it was basically no-questions-asked... because I imagine they're getting tons of these mailed back to them.
Did they require the failed drives to be returned? Did the secure erase function work on a failed drive? I guess this is a good reason for full disk encryption even on machines where I'm satisfied with their physical security.
Yes, they sent a prepaid label to return the bad drives. I did a secure erase both via Linux command line and via their proprietary software and it seemed to work. The whole process took about 3 weeks per drive.
I just had a 2TB 870 EVO fail too! There were SMART errors about uncorrectable errors, and I saw CRC errors in the OS. I lost some data.
This issue is all over the Internet, yet Samsung would not acknowledge it was a known issue. They also refused my RMA because the corner of one of the plastic port guides was chipped - we're talking about a miniscule chip, barely visible with the human eye. So despite the fact this drive was obviously defective, Samsung won't replace it. So I'm down £350 (£225 for the original drive, and £125 for the Crucial I had to buy to replace it), through no fault of my own.
I'm not buying Samsung SSDs again - problems are one thing, but how you deal with them is paramount.
Fortunately they failed one by one, so I was barely was able to recover my RAID array by pulling out one drive at a time, powering the computer off, and waiting for the RMA replacement to arrive.
But imagine my shock to see one drive fail... only to replace it with an RMA... and then days later, seeing the next drive fail... and the next!