Samsung 980 Pro has a nasty firmware glitch that could kill your SSD

PSA: The Samsung 980 Professional SSD launched final yr is an effective possibility for somebody seeking to improve to a solid-state storage answer, regardless of its excessive price per gigabyte. Nonetheless, in the event you purchased it quite a lot of months in the past, you may need to replace its firmware instantly.

Laptop builder Puget Programs experiences that some prospects are contacting it complaining about failing Samsung drives. The issue seems remoted to the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSD. The 500GB and 1TB fashions appear to be unaffected.

Puget Programs says the issue is a glitch within the drive’s firmware. The bug is inflicting SSDs with the unique firmware to change to read-only mode. This malaise completely renders the drive unusable for storage, but it surely may additionally trigger a pc to fail when used because the boot drive.

Whereas Samsung has not formally issued a warning or assertion, Puget Programs has labored intently with the corporate concerning dealing with it. Samsung stated its prospects ought to improve to the most recent firmware as quickly as doable. That model could be 5B2QGXA7.

The affected firmware is model 3B2QGXA7. Some newer drives got here put in with model 4B2QGXA7, which Puget says needs to be positive to run, however in case you are paranoid or do not know your model quantity, it would not damage to stay with Samsung’s advice.

To replace your 980 Professional’s firmware, go to Samsung’s support page and obtain and set up the SSD Magician app (above). Launch the software program, hit the replace button, and choose the suitable possibility on the brand new display (beneath).

Puget has contacted all of its affected prospects by way of electronic mail. Should you bought a drive immediately from Samsung, you may obtain communications from it on the difficulty.

Puget notes that the Samsung SSDs have been a few of its “most dependable components.” Nonetheless, a handful of 990 Professional customers reported quickly declining disk well being. In a single occasion, an proprietor seen the drive shedding about one % of its life score per week. One other stated he misplaced 64 % after solely 2TB of writes. That is not a very good signal for a drive rated at 1,200TBW.

It’s unclear if the 980 Professional line is struggling an analogous declining well being subject because the 990, however the bug’s timing feels fishy. As soon as an SSD reaches its write restrict, it does change to read-only mode. So house owners abruptly reporting drive failures may not have seen that their SSD well being had quickly declined since buy.