Puget Systems Confirm Issues Also on Samsung 980 PRO

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?
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As others have said try again or worst case scenario, pop it in your desktop, and try in that system. If you've found that it doesn't work on multiple machines, you can at least point to the drive as being a potential issue, and make a better informed decision from there.
 
Huh I have only seen new titles and didnt realize the 980 pro is having issues as well. I had a 980 Pro 2TB die on my last year with only 12TB written on it.
 
How should we go about checking this if the drive is installed on a PS5?
 
The amount of people who automatically go straight to Samsung when shopping for an SSD is shocking. Especially considering how saturated the NVMe market is these days.
Why pay more for a worse product? There's no benefit at all except the brand name.

They weren't worth buying before, now with reliability issues in the mix, they shouldn't even be considered.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
The amount of people who automatically go straight to Samsung when shopping for an SSD is shocking. Especially considering how saturated the NVMe market is these days.
Why pay more for a worse product? There's no benefit at all except the brand name.

They weren't worth buying before, now with reliability issues in the mix, they shouldn't even be considered.
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That's a nice opinion, but unfortunately it is not grounded in reality.

Sure this issue exists. It is bad. Sure there are great competitors (I have a WD SN850X 4TB in one box and it rocks) - but Samsung is the leader in the SSD space. I won't search and link to all of the reviews that back this up. I can just link to a newer article that is from the same folks referenced in this thread:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2023/02/02/update-on-samsung-ssd-reliability/

They reference several prior times they have outlined and highlighted Samsung as being superior. This doesn't erase that history.
 
sk3tch said:
That's a nice opinion, but unfortunately it is not grounded in reality.

Sure this issue exists. It is bad. Sure there are great competitors (I have a WD SN850X 4TB in one box and it rocks) - but Samsung is the leader in the SSD space. I won't search and link to all of the reviews that back this up. I can just link to the same article that is referenced in this thread:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2023/02/02/update-on-samsung-ssd-reliability/

They reference several prior times they have outlined and highlighted Samsung as being superior. This doesn't erase that history.
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Crucial was my go to drive when I was using a 2.5" drives. Now I choose Samsung and WD.
IMG_0672.JPG IMG_1565.JPEG IMG_1564.JPEG
 
I have a 250GB 980 Pro that I'm assuming isn't affected because it's had TBs and TBs of hundreds of 4k UHD remuxes, remuxed onto it over the past 2 years, and is working fine still 😮‍💨
 
sk3tch said:
That's a nice opinion, but unfortunately it is not grounded in reality.

Sure this issue exists. It is bad. Sure there are great competitors (I have a WD SN850X 4TB in one box and it rocks) - but Samsung is the leader in the SSD space. I won't search and link to all of the reviews that back this up. I can just link to a newer article that is from the same folks referenced in this thread:
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And if the standard for a company you use is "never has had an issue" then basically you are just going to keep changing from new company to new company, because anyone who has been around long enough is going to have problems. Bugs happen, it sucks but it is reality.
 
My 1TB and 2TB Samsung 980 Pro drives already had the most current firmware when bought. These drives are not even that expensive and if one automatically does back ups, at least for critical data, to whatever cloud base service provider you have or locally -> for me this is a non issue if it ever occurs besides lost time recovering. Just another view.
 
TaintedSquirrel said:
The amount of people who automatically go straight to Samsung when shopping for an SSD is shocking. Especially considering how saturated the NVMe market is these days.
Why pay more for a worse product? There's no benefit at all except the brand name.

They weren't worth buying before, now with reliability issues in the mix, they shouldn't even be considered.
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They occasionally have issues, but they still make the best SSD's by far.

Most of th eothers are just rebranded Phison controllers and the like. They brag about their high sequential numbers and their latest PCIe generations but where it really matters, IOPS and low queue depth 4k random reads they under-perform.

In my practical experience Gen 3 Samsungs have outperformed Gen 4 "badge engineering" drives in actual use, and I am willing to bet the same applies with Gen 4 Samsungs vs Gen 5 "badge engineering".

That, and despite this issue, they are still more reliable than the competition.

The philosophy used to be to buy Samsung or Intel drives only. Now Intel sold shut down their Opteron line, and sold off their their standard SSD line to SK Hynix, so who knows how good they will be going forward (or what they will even be called). But that leaves Samsung.

Experience has taught me to not trust gamer or budget branded SSD's. I buy lots of SSD's. Way more than your average PC hardware enthusiast consumer, and the only time I've had an SSD fail in recent memory (since I stopped buying OCZ drives which pretty much all failed within 2 years) was when I went against my better judgment and bought a drive that was neither Samsung nor Intel.

When I upgraded to my Threadripper in 2019, I wanted a Gen 4 drive, and the only one I could find at the time was a 2TB Sabrent Rocket 4.0, which is a Phison E16 based drive. While it boasted higher sequential speeds than the other drives on the market at the time which were all Gen 3, my existing Gen3 1TB Samsung 970 EVO outperformed it where it really mattered resulting in faster application and game load times. That, and after 3 years the Sabrent Rocket just died. Not slow increases in wear or anything like that. It reported everything fine one day, and the next morning was not detected by the system, and could not be brought back to life using any trick I could think of. Sabrent also gave me a really hard time when trying to claim my supposed 5 year warranty because I didn't register the drive within an arbitrary number of days of purchase. Bad experience, would not buy again.

My conclusion is this. Samsung is still the king of the performance that matters (not the pointless bragging rights sequential numbers) and reliability. If I were buying today and faced with choosing between a Gen 5 Phison rebrand or a Gen 4 Samsung drive, I'd go with Samsung every time. Just make sure you check and update the firmware every now and then.
 
noko said:
My 1TB and 2TB Samsung 980 Pro drives already had the most current firmware when bought. These drives are not even that expensive and if one automatically does back ups, at least for critical data, to whatever cloud base service provider you have or locally -> for me this is a non issue if it ever occurs besides lost time recovering. Just another view.
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Yeah I don't try to baby/limit usage on my SSDs like I did back when I had an 840 EVO and stuff - beat the hell out of them and just get whatever larger capacity for cheaper later when (?) they die
 
d3athf1sh said:
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.
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Even the Kingston KC3000's - another top performer and have not read of any issues with them under any OS or general problems..
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
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.
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Depends what you are doing and how you are using it, for day to day stuff you prob wont notice it, the issue is the cache does not flush and so you get down to half the performance.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/samsung-980-pro

You can then find posts all over samsung forums about people seeing the same performance issues
 
Yea, I'm going to avoid Samsung NVME going forward until they sort out these issues.
Competition is healthy for NVME.
But still stick to Samsung flash drives and micro SD.
 
I have an unused as of yet 980 Pro 2TB from 2021 so hearing about that Samsung has provided a firmware update that will prevent the premature and advanced wear on the drive is a big weight off my mind. However, I also have a 870 EVO 2TB from 2021 that is said to have itssues of its own (depending on who you ask its only certain manufacture dates in 2021 or others its all of 2021) . Any chance they'll come up with a firmware update that will prevent the issue for 870 EVO 2TBs too - or maybe they have already? But its good they're sorting this out at least for 980 / 990 Pro, but i do feel bad for those who've already used their drives with these issues. I've overall had a great experience with Samsung drives previously, including a 960 EVO, a 840 Pro and 860 EVO so I can hope they'll ensure things work properly going forward.
 
RanceJustice said:
I have an unused as of yet 980 Pro 2TB from 2021 so hearing about that Samsung has provided a firmware update that will prevent the premature and advanced wear on the drive is a big weight off my mind. However, I also have a 870 EVO 2TB from 2021 that is said to have itssues of its own (depending on who you ask its only certain manufacture dates in 2021 or others its all of 2021) . Any chance they'll come up with a firmware update that will prevent the issue for 870 EVO 2TBs too - or maybe they have already? But its good they're sorting this out at least for 980 / 990 Pro, but i do feel bad for those who've already used their drives with these issues. I've overall had a great experience with Samsung drives previously, including a 960 EVO, a 840 Pro and 860 EVO so I can hope they'll ensure things work properly going forward.
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Never seen anything official from samsung, not even an acknowledgement of the problem.

That being said: the 870evo's latest firmware is reported to stop those drives from self-destruction, and installation of that firmware stopped my 1TB one from its rapid descent into bad sector hell.
 
Yeah I've owned 4x 840 EVOs for PCs and HTPCs - one died after a year or so, Samsung replaced, rest worked fine I eventually ended up giving them away or selling a few

An 850 Pro - when I moved on from it it was still good - so still being used in portable external enclosure as jump drive

An 860 EVO mSATA I that when I made a new build I just threw this into a mSATA>Sata enclosure/adapter and made the OS drive on my Synology, still there to this day

980 Pro now - like I said, been remuxing 4K UHDs for 2 years now and still trucking

Samsung SSDs rock IMO - and they always keep them all updated with firmware updates, good support 👍

I got a WD Black SN750 only cause I got it for free - no problem with it but I notice no firmware updates ever 👀
 
staknhalo said:
I got a WD Black SN750 only cause I got it for free - no problem with it but I notice no firmware updates ever 👀
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That’s a feature in my book. Endless and constant firmware updates is a huge indicator of code smell and the modern “fix it til you make it” approach of aGiLe development - maybe acceptable for general software, but I definitely do not want that for hardware/firmware.

Anyway, I’ve been buying only Samsung SSDs for years but ever since the “Pro”-suffixed parts become decidedly non-Pro after the 970 and this latest round of lazy horseshit I won’t be buying anything else from Samsung. I do still have about 20x or so NIB 970 Pro 1TiB drives for new builds so it’ll be a while until I need new NVME SSDs…
 
How do you even update the firmware if your only M.2 slot holds a non-windows OS?

I suppose I could use a PCIe card...
 
sk3tch said:
That's a nice opinion, but unfortunately it is not grounded in reality.
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did you not forget that Samsung have always inflated their performance numbers by how well they perform "out of the box" instead of how they performed once there was a little bit of data on the drive? and the performance degraded exponentially the more that was written vs something like the sandisk extreme pro's that maintained their performance and blew away the samsung's of their day (sata 2.5's) after filling up the drive?!! it's almost as if samsung was cheating ala intel of the day with their security negligence that made their proc's faster than amd's at the time by forgoing security issues which ended up kept them the crown of "fastest processor" but in reality, would they have been if they would have made a foundationally secure product?
 
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uOpt said:
How do you even update the firmware if your only M.2 slot holds a non-windows OS?

I suppose I could use a PCIe card...
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Boot from usb drive with a recent live linux distro of your choice, extract the firmware updater from samsung's bootable iso and use that. There's quite a few guides for updating samsung ssd firmwares in that manner, since samsung displayed their competence by distributing an iso that doesn't boot.
 
stinger608 said:
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.
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Lame

“Last week Puget said it would no longer use 990 Pro or 980 Pro SSDs (except for the 500GB 980 Pro) "while this situation unfolds and we learn more." The system builder added, "we don't often announce changes to our product line like this, as brands and models shift all the time, but because we have been so outspoken about Samsung SSD reliability in the past, we felt that it was important to speak up in this particular situation."


While Samsung works out its ongoing issues with the 980 Pro and 990 Pro, Puget will instead use Sabrent SSDs ranging in capacity from 1 TB to 4TB.”

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-ssd-firmware-fix
 
uOpt said:
How do you even update the firmware if your only M.2 slot holds a non-windows OS?

I suppose I could use a PCIe card...
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I posted a link above, you can download the ISO image of the update and boot from a USB key and do it.
 
emphy said:
Boot from usb drive with a recent live linux distro of your choice, extract the firmware updater from samsung's bootable iso and use that. There's quite a few guides for updating samsung ssd firmwares in that manner, since samsung displayed their competence by distributing an iso that doesn't boot.
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Good to know, I hadn't tried it yet, how do you screw up making a boot iso these days?

No wonder their flagship NVMe drives are having issues... they can not even get a bootable ISO to work...

I loved Samsung for SSD's and phones (everyting else they make is crap with lipstick on it) and yes, no company is perfect, but when your flagship product has an issue as significant as this?
 
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