Puget Systems Confirm Issues Also on Samsung 980 PRO

stinger608

stinger608

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Sep 13, 2009
Messages
5,921
TPU recently posted an article about the endurance problem with the Samsung 990 Pro flagship SSD.

Well, Puget Systems has released a notice to update the firmware on Samsung's previous flagship SSD, the 980 Pro. For the most part, this is only affected on the 2TB drives, but there have been cases of the smaller drives being affected also.

This notice was just released today, January 31st 2023 by Chris Newhart of Puget Systems:
"If you have a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB drive, we HIGHLY recommend performing the firmware update described in this article. Samsung has stated that performing the update should prevent these failures, but it will not reverse the problem on an already failed drive."

Chris also goes on to show that Samsung has, in fact, confirmed this issue:

"Samsung has confirmed they are aware of the issue affecting firmware version 3B2QGXA7 and recommends users update the firmware on all 980 Pro drives to the latest version (5B2QGXA7) to prevent the issue from occurring. The firmware update will be non-invasive and data will be preserved. Nonetheless, we always recommend backing up your data before performing any action that could potentially impact sensitive data."

Chris Newhart also goes on to explain how to get the firmware and what to do if your drive has failed and is stuck in read-only mode:

"If you have a 980 Pro that is already stuck in read-only mode, it should be possible to copy the data onto another drive or to clone the drive using a 3rd party software such as Acronis, before replacing the drive.

Unfortunately, Samsung’s Data Migration has not been successful in our testing, as it only allows for data migration from a functional primary OS drive."


I personally, would suggest anyone running the Samsung 980 Pro drives, regardless of capacity, to at least check your firmware to ensure it is not the firmware affected by this issue.


So, it would appear that Samsung has finally acknowledged that their drives have an issue since the big controversy of the flagship 990 Pro issues.
 
Ruh-roh:
980pro.PNG


I had a 970 pro die unrecoverably on me last year. Would hate for that to happen to this one too. Thanks for the heads up!
 
Zepher said:
Mine is good with the updated firmware. I think I updated as soon as I installed it in July of last year.
Click to expand...

Same here, but it did make me double check everything to be safe. When building something, I always update the bios / firmware of components if available. It's just a good habit to get into as it'll save you lots of potential headaches.
 
My 2TB 980 Pro which I bought in June last year seems to have shipped with the "fixed" 5B2QGXA7 firmware they recommend upgrading to, as it has it, and I have no recollection of ever flashing it.

Drive wear seems to be good.

My desktop usage is fairly polite (nowhere near the drubbing the SSD's in my server take) as the desktop sees mainly normal desktop and game use, but since I work and play from home on the same PC they probably see more hours of use per day than most desktop machines.

The SMART data on the drive already seems corrupt though, as it says I only have 322 power on hours since then, which is ridiculous, as the machine -- while it does get shut down most nights, is easily in use 12 hours a day. It also says I've only written 6.62TB in that time, which also doesn't seem right, but that said my usage is not very write heavy, so I guess it could be.

The available spare is still at 100%, so assuming I can trust the SMART data at all, the drive wear has been really good on my 2TB 980 Pro. In 7 months of use I have consumed 0% of the drive :p

But this is a good reminder that SSD's have firmware too, and we should stay on top of it. I think most of us forget that is a thing.
 
What a shit show though I guess read only mode is about the best type of failure for a drive if there is such a thing.

The 980 pro was on my short list last fall when I was upgrading to 2TB but I dropped it after hearing about some reliability issues with it, glad I went a different route. Samsung was my go to brand for SSDs and NVMEs for several years but they seem to hitting a rough patch.
 
At least there is a fix for the 980 Pro, and this is hardly the first time a high-end SSD of any kind had faulty firmware shipped out.
Intel was guilty of this in their enterprise DC SSDs up until a few years ago where the drives would completely lock (unrecoverable) after being powered on for so many days.

Thanks for the heads up on this!
 
Is there a particular metric in samaung magician that indicates the drive starting to fail? I have a 2tb 980 pro...
 
sk3tch said:
This is crazy. I literally have 7 of these drives in use throughout my house in various boxes (980 Pro 2TB) - laptops, PCs, etc. - I buy Samsung to avoid this! Luckily I am super on top of firmware updates...
Click to expand...
I used to think of storage as something that you don't really need to worry about firmware updates. Some companies don't even make software to update ssd firmware. I checked though and my 980 pro is the latest firmware. I remember updating it several months ago. Hope it holds up.
 
I just updated the firmware on mine. Rebooted and the computer locked up. Bios now says I don't have a bootable drive even though the 980 pro is present. Guess it's time to shop for a new SSD.
 
xBanzai89 said:
I just updated the firmware on mine. Rebooted and the computer locked up. Bios now says I don't have a bootable drive even though the 980 pro is present. Guess it's time to shop for a new SSD.
Click to expand...
Dang. Sorry dude. RIP.

My warranty experience with Samsung has been good fwiw.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
My 2TB 980 Pro which I bought in June last year seems to have shipped with the "fixed" 5B2QGXA7 firmware they recommend upgrading to, as it has it, and I have no recollection of ever flashing it.

Drive wear seems to be good.

My desktop usage is fairly polite (nowhere near the drubbing the SSD's in my server take) as the desktop sees mainly normal desktop and game use, but since I work and play from home on the same PC they probably see more hours of use per day than most desktop machines.

The SMART data on the drive already seems corrupt though, as it says I only have 322 power on hours since then, which is ridiculous, as the machine -- while it does get shut down most nights, is easily in use 12 hours a day. It also says I've only written 6.62TB in that time, which also doesn't seem right, but that said my usage is not very write heavy, so I guess it could be.

The available spare is still at 100%, so assuming I can trust the SMART data at all, the drive wear has been really good on my 2TB 980 Pro. In 7 months of use I have consumed 0% of the drive :p

But this is a good reminder that SSD's have firmware too, and we should stay on top of it. I think most of us forget that is a thing.
Click to expand...
At least through Crystal DiskInfo I have the same issue with the power on hours. This machine has been on that many hours in the last two days. Samsung Magician isn't on this OS and I don't feel like installing it to check a POH setting. It does feel like driving with a broken odometer even though these things are super tough to kill:
1675227063064.png
 
Beaflag VonRathburg said:
At least through Crystal DiskInfo I have the same issue with the power on hours. This machine has been on that many hours in the last two days. Samsung Magician isn't on this OS and I don't feel like installing it to check a POH setting. It does feel like driving with a broken odometer even though these things are super tough to kill:
View attachment 545770
Click to expand...
I don't think this drive was out 12 years ago. (screen grab was taken 8-2021?
Samsung-840EVO-Power-On-Hours.jpg
 
Beaflag VonRathburg said:
At least through Crystal DiskInfo I have the same issue with the power on hours. This machine has been on that many hours in the last two days. Samsung Magician isn't on this OS and I don't feel like installing it to check a POH setting. It does feel like driving with a broken odometer even though these things are super tough to kill:
View attachment 545770
Click to expand...

You don't need to install Crystal Disk Info in order to use it as they offer a portable version of the app.
 
Wow nice, top this with the crap performance issues of the same 2TB drive many see under linux and Samsung really screwed up on this high end drive....
Last Samsung NVMe I am buying... (I own 2 x of the 2TB and both have the crap performance cache not flushing issue, this is when Samsung should give fully refunds if people want em
 
On a completely unrelated side note: if you've got samsung's 870 evo you´ll also want to make sure it's got the latest firmware. Those drives will silently destroy files when on old firmware.
 
My 980 Pro is already running the latest firmware. With ~50TB written, it's showing 89% in CrystalDiskInfo. I bought it as a used drive about a year ago and was somewhat alarmed that it was down at 89%, as my MLC 960 Pro that I've had for much longer is only at 94%. But after a year it's still at 89%.

Zepher said:
This one is still running strong after nearly 900TB of writes.

View attachment 545764
Click to expand...

That's pretty amazing, although 55% is getting down there and would make me a bit nervous.
 
Thanks for this post have two pros one in the PS5 but a 2TB in my system. Waiting for those 4TB drives but think the Duo sided chips would cause problems in laptops.
 
Comixbooks said:
Thanks for this post have two pros one in the PS5 but a 2TB in my system. Waiting for those 4TB drives but think the Duo sided chips would cause problems in laptops.
Click to expand...
A lot of the 4TB ones out are single sided, still! Definitely double check but yeah my lappy needed single side it was surprisingly easy to find.
 
xBanzai89 said:
I just updated the firmware on mine. Rebooted and the computer locked up. Bios now says I don't have a bootable drive even though the 980 pro is present. Guess it's time to shop for a new SSD.
Click to expand...
May want to look at those Western digital sn850's I've had one for a couple years now and I check every now and then and there's never any updates so it looks like it was a pretty solid product from release? plus that's what they are recommending for PS5 upgrades so I'm figuring they should work pretty good with direct storage games whenever we finally get them.
 
anyone know if this also effects the Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB NVMe (which is what I'm currently using)?
 
GotNoRice said:
My 980 Pro is already running the latest firmware. With ~50TB written, it's showing 89% in CrystalDiskInfo. I bought it as a used drive about a year ago and was somewhat alarmed that it was down at 89%, as my MLC 960 Pro that I've had for much longer is only at 94%. But after a year it's still at 89%.



That's pretty amazing, although 55% is getting down there and would make me a bit nervous.
Click to expand...
This was one of the drives my friend bought for his Chia Mining endeavor in early 2021 that I tried really hard to talk him out of. He bought a 1TB Samsung 870 first for plotting with his laptop, and when I finally got my Dark Hero motherboard, I told him to get a 1TB 980 Pro and I'd do the plotting and farming on my setup.
I recall it being around 4+ hours/100GB plot and you could do 3 simultaneous plots on a 1TB drive with the 5600X I bought temporarily while I was waiting to procure a 5900X at MSRP. His laptop was taking 8+ hours per plot and could only do 1 plot at a time while mine could do 3.

He bought five 8TB drives which held 73 plots per drive. Plotting all the drives used 400TB of writes on the 980 Pro. Chia mining didn't have pools back then so you were solo mining and the only way to get any Chia was to actually have the block in your farm so the larger your farm is the higher chance to get some Chia. Didn't get any Chia with such a small 40TB farm during the first few months.

When Chia got pools around mid 2021, you had to replot all of your drives for pooling. At that time there I used a plotter called Mad something, and it dropped plotting time substantially, less than 30 minutes/plot, so I was able to replot the 40TB's in a couple of days. That used another 400+TB of writes.
When we shut the farm down in 2022, he had earned around $250-300 in Chia, but spent $1,300 on the five 8TB drives, a 1TB 870 and 1TB 980 Pro.

He sold me all the drives for $400 and gave me almost half of the Chia since I plotted the drives and ran the farm.
And it was a pain to cash out the Chia, none of the mainstream Exchanges traded it, so I had to find a reputable one that did since there were so many shady looking overseas exchanges, make an account there, hope the Chia gets there, and then convert the Chia to bitcoin and transfer it to my Coinbase account.
He also got into Helium mining and that was a pain to get converted as well since it wasn't traded on the mainstream exchanges either.

Oh, just remembered, there were shady miners that would use up SSD's and NVME's plotting and then return them to Amazon and Best Buy, so it wasn't wise to buy used or open boxed SSD or NVME drives during 2021.
 
Last edited:
MrGuvernment said:
Wow nice, top this with the crap performance issues of the same 2TB drive many see under linux and Samsung really screwed up on this high end drive....
Last Samsung NVMe I am buying... (I own 2 x of the 2TB and both have the crap performance cache not flushing issue, this is when Samsung should give fully refunds if people want em
Click to expand...

I have a 980 Pro in Linux, and it works perfectly. No performance issues at all. Are the people having this problem trimming their drives?

I'll probably continue buying Samsung drives none-the-less.

Samsung SSD's have been some of the most reliable and best performing (if you look at the metrics that really matter, low queue depth 4k random or IOPS, not sequential, which is mostly meaningless).

I see Samsung's SSD's as the best quality drives in the market, that - like all products - have occasional problems.

Every time I've tried something other than Samsung or Intel on the SSD front I've regretted it. Last time was a 2.0TB Sabrent Rocket 4.0 (best I can tell, a standard Phison E16 rebadge) which one morning after a 3 years of use just wasn't detected and never came back. It didn't even have heavy writes.

Intel has sold off their division to SK Hynix, so no guarantees they keep up the quality, which leaves Samsung.

The only lesson I take from this when it comes to adjusting my habits is to stay on top of firmware upgrades for SSD's where available.
 
Both my 980 pro's were running the "bad" firmware, a 2Tb and a 1 Tb. I updated the firmware just to be safe, but I've been using them for a couple of years with no problems fortunately.
 
I have a 980 pro 1 tb in my laptop on the bad firmware. I tried to update the firmware using samsung magician but it gives an error can not update firmware should I be worried?
 
Kirika said:
I have a 980 pro 1 tb in my laptop on the bad firmware. I tried to update the firmware using samsung magician but it gives an error can not update firmware should I be worried?
Click to expand...
Reboot and try again? I've received that message before, I believe. If you can't update it, you should backup your data ASAP and contact Samsung perhaps they can hook you up with a replacement.

This is a must have when you're dealing with M.2 format drives - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RVC6F9Y/.
 
sk3tch said:
Reboot and try again? I've received that message before, I believe. If you can't update it, you should backup your data ASAP and contact Samsung perhaps they can hook you up with a replacement.

This is a must have when you're dealing with M.2 format drives - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RVC6F9Y/.
Click to expand...
Samsung Magician doesn't see the drive when in one of those enclosure, btw. So you can't use that to update the firmware.
I do have a couple I use for moving files or cloning drives.
 
Zepher said:
Samsung Magician doesn't see the drive when in one of those enclosure, btw. So you can't use that to update the firmware.
I do have a couple I use for moving files or cloning drives.
Click to expand...
Correct. CDI does work, though!

Everyone should have that enclosure (or one like it) if they use M.2 since it makes cloning/backup so easy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top