Came across it looking how to deal with multiple different samsung drives caught in bad states due to shitty firmware. My original salty post warning about vendor branded Samsung drives on eBay is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37165189
Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fridges failing after a few years (or having too little coolant in them so that they make loud popping sounds when running and Samsung saying you’re holding it wrong)
From these experiences, I’m going out of my way to never buy anything made by Samsung.
Right. And their complete contempt for user privacy on their smart TVs. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, I'll even pay extra to buy anything but a Samsung device.
They don't do VoLTE when rooted. Their own stock ROM is on par with iPhone-level unworkable UI garbage. Apps that work on everything but not Samsung Galaxy. The only ROMs you can feasibly get on most models are limited to GSI builds.
Telegram. When I used that, everyone would get their messages except those who had a samsung because it's continuously on a background task shooting spree.
The weird thing is WhatsApp isn't affected but I'm never going to install that facebook crap. Even the mandatory work phone doesn't have it.
In my case, the drive suddenly only shows having 1GB of read only space available. The firmware version will be reported as “ERRORMOD” (meaning, error mode). There are no warning signs, it just happens.
All data is lost the moment you see ERRORMOD, there is no recovery of data that I am aware of. It is sometimes possible to clear the drive and recover function for the now untrustworthy drive: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/pm9a3-firm...
It’s not the only way a drive can fail, but it’s the most immediately obvious one.
Other ways of the firmware failing result in no drive showing up at all, or data corruption. Physical failures can also happen, like breakage of the solder balls under the chips (which fixable enough to get data off it).
BTW thank you for raising this.