In recent months, Samsung 980 Pro SSD owners have been complaining about their drives failing unexpectedly. Most of the complaints were registered in China. According to Tom’s Hardware, there was no official statement from Samsung, but there was from the large PC assembler Puget Systems informed, which helped the manufacturer to determine the root of this problem. As it turned out, a specific firmware version on the 980 Pro drives was the culprit.
Image source: Tom’s Hardware
According to Puget Systems, Samsung 980 Pro drives started failing due to firmware code 3B2QGXA7. Most often, SSDs with a capacity of 2 TB fail, but cases of model failures and smaller capacities are known. Puget didn’t go into details of the issue, but users on the Reddit forum suggested that it was an anomalous set of errors numbered 0E (media integrity error) and 03 (free space error) in drives’ SMART settings. They also recommended using a proprietary application to scan Samsung SSD Magician drives for the presence of these errors.
“The new 2TB SSD has over 2,000 errors. Another of the same volume found more than 32,000 errors. This SSD went into “read mode”. I assume that the other two will soon fail as well.”– complained one of the users who own several drives Samsung 980 Pro.
Another Samsung 980 Pro owner complained about a similar issue: “I bought a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro in February and only installed it in May. It states that the SSD was manufactured in August 2021. After four months of work, I ran Samsung Magician and noticed that the number of media integrity errors went from 300 to over 6000. I also found 9 red blocks. The wielder has lost 5% capacity and is at 95% health. Only 4.1 TB of information was overwritten on the SSD. careful use».
What happens if an SSD has an unusual number of 0E and 03 errors in SMART settings? Most of the time this means that the drive is already on its last legs. According to Puget, most of the time, in such cases, users face a situation where the SSD goes into read-only mode. The drive becomes unusable. Unfortunately, in the face of such a situation, there is nothing more that the user can do – the problem cannot be solved by simply updating the SSD firmware.
Image Credit: Puget Systems
Samsung has released a new firmware for the Samsung 980 Pro that avoids the above situation with the still working SSD. Samsung 980 Pro drive owners with 3B2QGXA7 firmware are advised to install the latest 5B2QGXA7 firmware through the app as soon as possible. Samsung wizard. It should be clarified that Samsung 980 Pro models with firmware 4B2QGXA7 and 5B2QGXA7 are not affected by the above issue.
Puget Systems and Samsung also recommend that users who experience their drives failing contact their support services.
Add Comment