Samsung SSD Write Limits

I noticed my older son’s gaming computer had restarted and was on blank-ish screen. For whatever reason the machine has always had issues with resuming from hibernating. Initially I assumed it had suspended for some reason. Upon closer look it was asking for boot media.

Much time has passed since I have interacted with Windows at a partition level. Most of my knowledge is definitely around Linux, OSX, and FreeBSD at this point.

Reinstalling, Rollbacks, and Repairing

None of the typical GUI options worked. They all failed within a few minutes and on reboot did not help. We methodically went through each element without luck. Restarting between the option as the tools requested.

Verifying the File System

For the most part chkdsk C: worked remarkably well. On the first pass the utility found some corrupted sectors and fixed them. We were unable to perform chkdsk /f C: to fix the disk.

sfc /ScanNow was my next big discovery for diagnostics. This was really the first real pointer towards the actual problem. sfc complained the disk is read only. The Windows installation was valid. Leaving only the bootloader.

bcdboot is one tool built into Windows for managing the bootloader. Honestly I am not sure if this is a modern tool as Windows seems to have a lot of either missing or backwards compatible as it is labeled for Windows 10. There is not much for Windows 11. Again this failed with the drive not write-able with something like bcdboot C:\Windows /s C: /f ALL . On to figuring out how to remount the volume in read write mode.

diskpart is a tool I have never used before but felt like old like partition managers. You enter a shell for commands. Running select disk 0 and select volume 0 was correct for this scenario. You can use list disk, list volume, and list partition to gather info on the state. After selecting detail disk gave use the biggest clue. The disk was in read-only mode. Attempting to clear the attribute via attributes disk clear readonly would fail. There appeared to be no way to clear the Currently read-only flag. Including via registry edits.

Samsung 970 Evo Total Bytes Written (TBW) Limit

Eventually, based on several hours of research it appears like these drives have a firmware limit for writes. Once this limit has been hit the drive forces itself into read only mode. Windows will refuse to boot of the drive with a cryptic error message.

Honestly a reasonable error message from the bootloader or any of the applications would have saved us a few hours. I feel like there should have been a persistent warning message about 80-90%. Perhaps it was a confusing message, although he is fairly good at asking. Perhaps their specific driver would have been helpful.

Regardless I am happy the data is read only. We can recover what is important and move on. I am hoping once we recover the data the Samsung Magician tool will allow us to bypass the write barrier, or Linux does not care and does it anyway. Either way I need to learn more about Windows. And SSDs should warn about the TBW instead of just locking into readonly mode.