Samsung Issues new Firmware to prevent Dying 980 Pro SSDs
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Kaarme
Uhhuh... My 980 Pro 1TB has that exact firmware. I guess I need to install Samsung SSD Wizard. It shows no media and data integrity errors and available spare is at 100, so I guess I've been safe until now. Luckily I was not late, but I was not early either. Perhaps I'm right on time.
Thanks for the headsup!
Glottiz
Ummm what? 5B2QGXA7 firmware was released over a year ago.
Sounds like you picked up year old news story that was already resolved. Maybe you got confused and mixed up 980 Pro and 990 Pro (which was just making headlines recently) ?
RealNC
What's the point of going into read-only mode if there's no way to recover the data? If I put my USB disk in read-only mode, I can read it just fine :P
mbk1969
I suspect by recovering they mean turning read-only mode OFF. Not copying data from drive.
barbacot
It seems that 970 EVO drives are also affected....
Thank God I switched some years ago from samsung to WD 850 Black for all my NVMe drives and once you go black you never go back - everybody knows....
NiColaoS
What? 970 as well? I'm using exclusively Samsung since the 830 and got them all. Not because they were going bad or something, simply because I fell in love with SSDs early. Now, I was with two 970 EVO Plus. I was drunk once and to this day don't know what I was trying to do and managed to break the pins. So, since I heard too many good things about 850 black, I now have one 970 EVO Plus and one 850 Black. Need to download the Magician to check if there's an update. The last time I did was 1 year ago and was in latest version. Is there newer version which came out lately?
JamesSneed
Its just now being determined that the older firmware causes failures, so folks are being urged to update. Some people never update firmware hence why this is news. Any of us that check for firmware updates should be fine.
Kaarme
Samsung SSD Magician didn't find a new firmware for my 970 EVO, only for the 980 Pro. I've no recollection of updating the 970 EVO firmware, so if I did, it most certainly wasn't very recently (during the last few years).
Astyanax
only the cheapskated 970 evo's, the original design isn't.
geogan
I noticed only yesterday that some Steam game installs on my Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 M.2 SSD 2TB game drive were reporting file errors
I did a Steam verify of about 10 games installed on the drive and most were OK but a few had 1 or two files with errors out of a couple GB installs
eg below Automobilista 2 two files in 86GB .
A plague Tail Innocence had 1 file in 41GB,
Project Cars 2 had 1 file in 50GB
I only noticed this when Automobilista crashed mid game and told me some file it tried to load was corrupt.
I hope all these fancy new motherboard SSD are not all slowly fading away and losing bits all over the place... if it wasn't for the Steam validator I wouldn't have even been able to check these. But who knows what other files are corrupt now - wouldn't see this kind of problem on an old fashioned mechanical drive.
Kushana
I had one of the 2TB 980Pro SSDs that failed. I bought it in Feb. 2022, and it failed in Nov. after about 20TB of writes. Contrary to what the story says, you absolutely can read data off of it after it goes into RO mode. You can't boot from it, though.
Samsung honoured its warranty through the retailer and gave me my purchase price back, which translated into a 2TB Kingston KC3000 and $200 spare for me.
waltc3
It's only for the newer 980 Pro 2TB SSD, and it's just a bios fix--you install new bios firmware via Magician and that is supposed to solve the problem. That may be why people were seeing more drive writing than they thought they should see with this model. Probably anyone with that particular 2TB SSD should update the firmware.
toyo
Hard to understand how they messed this up so badly. I own a few 970 Evo+ drives, and some even (much) older ones like the 850 Evo, and they never developed any media errors in years of use and dozens of written TB. Crazy that a large tech business like Samsung managed to fail like this, let's hope the firmware fixes things, although more details about what exactly happened and how the drives died would be nice. Is it a firmware "cosmetic" error? Is the NAND fine? Is the drive actually writing itself to death?
MaCk0y
What's the latest firmware version for 970 evo plus? I cannot use Magician to check for new firmware updates.
kakarot
Not seeing any updates for 2tb drives
toyo
2B2QEXM7 for me
Crazy Joe
For me as well. I don't think Samsung has released any new firmware for the 970 Evo plus recently.
BTW: This issue is now being reported because there is a similar problem being seen with the 990 Pro, so I'm guessing the issues with the 980 Pro were delved up again and Samsung decided to let everyone know that they should update the firmware for the 980 Pro to the latest version (which indeed is almost a year old now) in order to not get into trouble with their 980 Pros.
Glottiz
Samsung messed up? Do you have failure rates data? You know that everything in tech has a chance to fail. Without failure rates this "internet outrage" is meaningless. These drives are for enthusiasts, who are more likely to track their drive health and post about it on forums. Other cheap drives from lesser known brands probably have 10x higher failure rates, but no one cares as users who have them in mid range laptops don't even know what NVMe means.
toyo
Yes they messed up, BADLY SO.
This is not a GPU that you can replace, it's data. It's also not about failure rates, it's likely that Samsung messed up something instead, likely in firmware since it seems new ones correct the issue. Hard to tell what. Broken garbage collection, non-stop writing in the background, not transparent to the OS etc.
What outrage? The only outrage comes from your post, who casually dismisses a large corporation being stupid and putting data of its customers at risk.
Glottiz
Don't forget to breathe... and have backups 😀
