Hacker News Reader

Comment by ls612 | Hacker News Reader

You are confusing the 980 pro and the 990 pro. The 990 Pro had a firmware bug causing largely accelerated wear which was fixed by an update in January. The 980 Pro had a bug in firmware causing the drive to just fail (enter read only mode) after a certain amount of time, this had been fixed for well over a year in firmware but many people didn't update their firmware and so were surprised when the requisite amount of time passed.

View on HN

> The 980 Pro had a bug in firmware causing the drive to just fail (enter read only mode) after a certain amount of time, this had been fixed for well over a year in firmware but many people didn't update their firmware

I literally just finished putting all the parts of my new build in my basket but haven't ordered it yet. I was going for a 980 Pro (for it seems reasonably priced)... If I buy brand new from Samsung, would you happen to know if I'll get a SSD with the latest firmware or would I need to apply the firmware update by myself?

FWIW I ran a 950 Pro when it came out (2015?), then a 970 Evo (which my wife is now using). I've been very happy with these NVMe M.2 SSDs.

Most likely yes. I bought a new 980 Pro 2TB a few weeks ago and it came with the latest firmware. Manufacture date is Jan 2023. The firmware is already more than a year old so unless you get very old stock it should come with it.

I just upgraded this week from a 950 pro to a 980 pro, it came with the current firmware.

Their data magician software (windows) will update it if needed, they also have an ISO. I had no luck getting the ISO to detect any keyboard till noticing I'm already updated.

You can simply extract the firmware updater binary from the iso and run it directly from your own linux pc. More complicated if you only have a single drive though.

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

Just got a 980 pro 2TB, it came with the latest firmware.

just get a wd sn850x

Oh wow... It is a bit pricier but I just checked on https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/ and it looks like a fine SSD, thanks for the tip.

just fyi Userbenchmark is total useless and pretty much banned all around on PC enthusiast subs on reddit. They altered scores on a whim or what is "better" or not compared to something in their rankings.

What's a good alternative site to use? I really like their comparison feature.

fwiw I have both and both are fine with the latest firmware.

They have been bsod & crashing in win11. Hopefully like Samsung gets fixed fast, but it's been an issue for 6 mo now.

Really quite impressed by the sn850x but also iirc it also bogs down under prolonged writes[1]. But great general speed, good price. Hoping WD can keep iterating well.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-black-sn850x-ssd-rev...

Nope, I've watched two 980 pro die already. But I wouldn't be surprised if both 980 and 990 had firmware issues.

Does windows update the firmware automatically? I may have a couple of these ssds but never thought to check firmware

No but the Samsung Magician software will automatically tell you to update the firmware and do it for you.

that software is absolute garbage crapware

the disk "migrator" doesn't even bother with the difficulties of migrating in-use files

it either just skips them or corrupts them

I just use it to update the drive firmware and as a convenient way to check the SMART data for the drive. It doesn't use hardly any resources in the background so I don't worry about it that much.

Ah, for the 6 people in the world who have that?

You can just straight downlod the fw file in a Linux .iso > make a flash drive bootable and update https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/t...

heh, yeah I installed it just for the update and immediately uninstalled it.

Someone who buys an evo pro knows to install magician, at least to update the firmware for the first use, or so i hope - it would be like buying a high-end nvidia and using the drivers from windows update.

There's a difference between a GPU that gets new drivers every week (and essential to gaming/working) and an SSD, which I personally have never even thought about checking the firmware for.

why would you assume you need to install software for a drive?

I've not done so and my SSDs work fine..

I’ve had my 980 pro disconnected for a long time. Is it safe to plug it in to update the firmware?

Yes. In general: if there's no battery/supercap, it doesn't have a clock that keeps counting when disconnected. Consistent with that, my understanding is that the bug hits when the power-on counter hits a certain threshold.

I think that the 980 pro issue came to light a month ago when the earliest made SSDs got old enough to trigger the bug. So you should be good unless you got one of the first ever made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com