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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

I have this exact model, 980 Pro 2TB.

It says to update firmware, but how can you do that from Linux? The instructions are all about some Windows program. Thanks!

EDIT: I'm quite happy with the warning from this article, fixed a potential future problem!

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If you're on linux, you probably want to use fwupd[1]. You can check the existing version of your drive's firmware by running `fwupdmgr get-devices`. The version with the fix is 5B2QGXA7.

I'm on Arch and apparently I installed the update at some point in the past.

1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fwupd

Samsung is publishing some firmware but not this. (https://fwupd.org/lvfs/vendors/#samsung, https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/issues/5477)

  $ fwupdmgr get-updates
  Devices with no available firmware updates: 
   • SSD 980 PRO 2TB

It would be good to put some pressure on Samsung to use the Linux Vendor Firmware Service. I just opened a support ticket about it.

fwupd is at least manually adding a warning about the affected firmware. https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/pull/5481

Oops, you're correct. Looking through my shell history, it seems I manually downloaded and installed the firmware update in March of 2022. Here are the commands I ran:

    curl -O https://semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/software-resources/Samsung_SSD_980_PRO_5B2QGXA7.iso
    mkdir /mnt/iso
    sudo mount -v -o loop ./Samsung_SSD_980_PRO_5B2QGXA7.iso /mnt/iso/
    mkdir /tmp/fwupdate
    cd /tmp/fwupdate
    gzip -dc /mnt/iso/initrd | cpio -idv --no-absolute-filenames
    cd root/fumagician/
    sudo ./fumagician

A few months ago I already updated my Samsung SSD by following this procedure: https://askubuntu.com/a/1386451. Theoretically they provide an image to boot from to do the update, but the image seems very outdated and did not recognize my keyboard so it was unusable.

I now found and followed this:

https://blog.quindorian.org/2021/05/firmware-update-samsung-...

And it seems to have worked. After extracting this updater tool and running it, smartctl kept showing the old firmware version (3B2QGXA7), but after reboot it now shows the new version (5B2QGXA7).

I took the risk of running this while the OS (Archlinux) was running with the disk mounted (this is the OS install disk), and at first sight this didn't cause issues. But still do it at your own risk!!

Thanks, but that takes me to old firmware. I was however able to download the new firmware from https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/t... and use the same procedure and it worked:

    ├─SSD 980 PRO 2TB:
    │     Device ID:          03281da317dccd2b18de2bd1cc70a782df40ed7e
    │     Summary:            NVM Express solid state drive
    │     Current version:    5B2QGXA7

My home is on non-redundant stripe of two 980 Pro which both had the bad firmware, so I was obviously motivated, but not panicked as it's replicated hourly to spinning rust (and I have offsite backups). I treat Flash memory as dynamic ram with only slightly better retention.

The command line example in the link shows the old firmware, but they do say to go to the samsung website and get the latest one there. The 980 was the first one in the list there under the Firmware section.

Also seems to have worked for me doing 3B2QGXA7→5B2QGXA7 in NixOS. Extract ISO, extract initrd, run fumagician, reboot.

The command can be simplified as

  isoinfo -R -i xxx.iso -x /initrd | gzip -dc | cpio -idv --no-absolute-filenames "root/fumagician*"

if you don't want to go through the mounting and extracting everything.

This worked for me, thanks! I have a Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB which I upgraded from 2B2QGXA7 to 5B2QGXA7. I backed up and also made a copy of the output of `sudo smartctl -t long -a /dev/nvme0` before and after.

For me `isoinfo` doesn't like the format of the .iso file ("CD-ROM is NOT in ISO 9660 format"). Using bsdtar worked though:

  bsdtar xOf xxx.iso initrd | gzip -dc | cpio -idv --no-absolute-filenames "root/fumagician*"

(And of course then running `root/fumagician/fumagician` in either case.)

I was trying to figure out why the update wasn't working on my Archlinux box. After a few attempts I barely caught a glimpse of an error message that flashed by: something along the lines of "unzip not found".

After installing unzip, the firmware updated successfully.

I think I managed to upgrade the firmware from within Kubuntu (it wasn't the OS Nvme) by using this method

https://blog.quindorian.org/2021/05/firmware-update-samsung-...

I've done it some months ago, so I don't remember if it was that one exactly.

I'm now relieved to know that 5B2QGXA7 is still the current one.

an example:

    nvme fw-log /dev/nvme0
    nvme id-ctrl /dev/nvme0 -H | grep Firmware
    nvme fw-download -f firmware.ebin /dev/nvme0
    nvme fw-commit /dev/nvme0 -s 2 -a 3
    nvme fw-log /dev/nvme0

In an unlikely event, may need to change the slot (-s)

Following from my linux desktop. I lost a system SSD that was a 980 2 TB and recently reinstalled everything, thinking it was a fluke. Now worried it will happen again rapidly.

I just put the same drive in my PS5 in December. None of my Windows machines have spare NVMe slots, so updating this should be interesting

boot from Windows on a SATA drive?

From TFA it's not just the 980 Pro 2 TB but also all the newer 990, so it's problematic.

The article switches from the 980 issue to the 990 issue in a bit of an unclear way, but I think they're independent problems and the firmware update should fix the 980 one?

nvme drives can be updated from the command line. I've done it myself.

Extracting the actual firmware update from the files Samsung gives you might be an issue though.

nvme-cli can, in principle, upload firmware. I’ve never personally tried it.

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