Chrispy_ wrote:I replaced the POS 840 in my workstation about six weeks ago. That means it's unpowered, sitting on a shelf.
If I can remember I'll plug it in and test it in the new year or something to see what it's like after 6 months.
Okay I actually want to repurpose this drive over Christmas, hence the test now after only 24 weeks instead of 26 weeks, but it should be close enough to prove any points.
Well, look at that! This vanilla 840 is performing about as badly as it was before the unpowered test (don't worry about the max values of only 221MB/s, that's because I used it in a SATAII 3Gbps port). Several lows of around 100MB/s is about right for my defective 840 about a week after diskfresh, but otherwise it's exactly as it was six months ago.
This is good news for vanilla 840 owners (and presumably the 840EVO owners too) in that the voltage drift issue isn't a problem if the drive is unpowered. Your drives only go "bad" whilst they're powered on in a PC, indicating that the problem is caused by reading the data (or maybe just having the controller alive and doing it's firmware things) and that even the dubious performance of these drives does not seem to affect unpowered retention.