Samsung SSDs Dying! 980 Pro, 990, 970 EVO PLUS, PM9A1 and More Reporting Failures – Everything We Know So Far!

Samsung SSD Failure Reports Increasing – What is happening?

Note, Feb 15/02/23 – There is Updated Information on the Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD Firmware Issue. You can find out more in the article and video below:

Samsung 990 Pro SSD Firmware Failures UPDATED Video – HERE

Samsung 990 Pro SSD Failures UPDATED Article – HERE

Reports have been increasingly online in the last 6 months or so of Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD drives failing unexpectedly failing, despite being well under the write and endurance levels that they arrive with. First emerging in China on the forum ChipHell, these sporadic failures started to get present something of a pattern among the user base, with specific drive models and firmware in common. Then later, huge US-based PC builder Puget Systems started seeing an increase from their customer base of similar drive failure rates (in particular, but not limited to, the Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4 SSD. Puget stated the following online:

Despite historically being some of our most reliable parts, we have received a surprising number of reports of failing Samsung drives, specifically with the 2TB version of the 980 Pro. We have been working with Samsung to investigate these failures, and they have recently confirmed that there is an issue affecting the older firmware that some 980 Pro drives were shipped with. The most common failure mode that we have found is that the drives are suddenly locked into read-only mode, rendering the drive unusable. If the failed drive is the primary drive, then the system becomes unbootable until the drive is replaced and the OS is reinstalled. – Puget Systems, Support

Although not initially loud on this, Samsung has since confirmed (in conjunction with Puget Systems input) that they are aware of the issue affecting drives with the firmware version 3B2QGXA7 and recommends users update the firmware on all Samsung 980 Pro drives to the latest version (5B2QGXA7, at time of writing) using the Samsung Magician tool for PC/Mac to prevent the issue from occurring. Much like any other SSD firmware update, this is not going to reinitialize the SSD or format it in any way, so all data stored onboard will be maintained. Though for some users who are using Samsung 980 Pro SSDs in closed systems (such as PS5 and it’s expansion storage bay), there is no real way to check the firmware of the SSD in the Playstation 5 GUI, as well as update the firmware. If you are a PS5 user and concern about how you check/update your firmware, skip ahead to the bottom of the article. Otherwise, let’s discuss how the Samsung SSD has been reported to affect users.

How Does the Samsung SSD Issue manifest itself?

Although the bulk of the initially reported failures that people were experiencing with firmware 5B2QGXA7 rise appeared in China, the steady increase in other regions was not slow to follow (appearing on Reddit in numerous posts, for example HERE and HERE ) with many users highlighting that the firmware issue would manifest itself within 6-12 months of use. Using the disk maintenance tool CrystalDiskInfo, users began seeing the health of drives drop and increased values in 0E and 03 measurement IDs from within the program:

ID in AIDA64	ID in CrystalDiskInfo	Attribute Description	Value
160	0E	Media Errors (Media and Data Integrity Errors)	> 0
3	03	Available Spare	< 100 (or < 0x64)

You can download CrystalDisknfo HERE (it’s free). For those with less experienced, using this tool you are able to get a comprehensive breakdown of the SSD in your system and from there you can find out the drive’s health (including total power on time, write amount, temperature over time, S.M.A.R.T info and more). For example, here are two tests of two Samsung SSDs, the Samsung 980 Pro and Samsung 970 EVO Plus (so you know where to look, these are NOT drives that have been affected by this firmware issue):

If you have already been affected by this firmware issue on your Samsung SSD (and you do not run routine checks on your SSD and/or do not have health monitoring tools such as CrystalDiskInfo in place for alerts), the most immediate impact will be that the SSD will change from ‘Read/Write’ status, to ‘Read Only’. This is a preventative measure by the drive, as it has reported bad blocks/spacing internally. If the SSD is being used as a secondary/additional drive, then you should still have the option to copy the contents over to a health drive (then pursue your warranty with Samsung accordingly – as proceeding with a firmware update will not reverse this!). If an SSD is read-only, then you should already see the difference, as you will not be able to add/write data to it. But, if you still want to be 100% sure, In windows, head to the start menu (or windows icon, depending on your system windows version), and search for Disk Management:

Note – DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING, JUST CHECK. AS CHANGING PARTITIONS OR ANY DRIVE’S IDENTITY HERE CAN RUIN YOUR OS OR FORMAT THE DRIVE!!

If your drive is affected, it will likely show as ‘read only’, as shown below:

Although some users have reported that initial checks, or even periodic passive checks by CrystalDiskInfo have not shown any issues (highlighting that the bug/issue in the firmware is ‘triggered’ by particular activity. Upon checking using the Samsung magician tool (the one you will need to check and update your firmware), they found the bad blocks and details of the SMART values increasing. You can download Samsung Magician HERE.

Once installed and up and running, it should immediately find your SSD, as well as detail the drive’s health, firmware and provide options for numerous diagnostic scans. users who have been impacted by this reported firmware issue, observed the following:

(Source Example – Chiphell, User: Scallion Fish)

Over on Reddit, the issue increased in notoriety with a few affected users and in general PSAs. This detailed further on the specifics of the use with the values that increased in CrystalDiskInfo scanned drives. There is also talk of this appearing on Chinese mainstream media, but links are no longer available and its tough to confirm (see gallery):

Which brings us to now, with this increased reported failure in particular Samsung SSDs, related to the firmware, being reported on numerous online sources (example 1, 2, 3).

This led to Puget Systems releasing a dedicated post on this for their user base that covered alot of information garnered so far (based on reports from their user base) and with further input from Samsung on the issue, which can be found HERE. However, the details surrounding the extent of the affected drives (as this is an old firmware that would have been patched out on later production models of the SSDs over time) and the range of SSDs affected by this (as many Samsung SSDs use similar firmware revisions across ranges – not uncommon among SSD manufacturers).

Which Samsung SSDs are being reported as affected by this firmware issue?

Despite these firmware-related Samsung SSD failures that seem to be hinged on an old firmware revision being observed and reported online for a little under half a year, the details surrounding the affected drive models in the Samsung product family are still a little less clear. Over on Chiphell, a pretty massive consolidation effort has been made to identify affected drives, firmware and revisions. Se below:

Google Translate is your friend here! Below is the translation (again, HUGE thank you to kevin335200 for the arguably thankless task of correlating it all):

At the beginning, everyone should know that S6 is high-risk, but I still want to determine the approximate batch range as much as possible, so I have the following incomplete statistics.  At the beginning of the serial number, it mostly occurs when the amount of writing is < 15T, and the overall concentration is in the whole year of 21 (so the eighth digit is mainly R), but there are still a few at the end of 20 years (the eighth digit is N) and 22 years ( Case update with eight digits T): 870 EVO models will be produced on a revised V6 process from November 2022).

PM9A1 produced in January 22 Source: https://www.chiphell.com/thread -2435363-1-1.html
Source of 970 EVO PLUS produced in April 22: https://tieba.baidu.com/p/8151516105
Source of 980 PRO produced in November 22: https://www.bilibili. com/video/BV1pA411d7sTBecause

it involves multiple models and different generations of master controllers, and PM9A1 also covers batches with factory firmware 7301Q / 7401Q and various OEM firmwares, it can be judged that it has little correlation with master controllers and firmware , but it is still recommended to upgrade to the latest firmware

PM9A1 The current latest 7701Q/7702Q firmware: https://www.chiphell.com/thread-2477782-1-1.html
PM9A3 The current latest 5602Q/7302Q firmware: https://www.chiphell .com/thread-2457407-1-1.html

870 EVO is also a hard-hit area. As a SATA disk, the corresponding SMART item is BB (Uncorrectable Error Count) / C3 (ECC Error Rate), and the FC item is added in the latest SVT02B6Q firmware (CDI is not included, it is displayed as a manufacturer-specific item) , the specific counting meaning is unknown, but it is better to be 0.

Update: According to PM863a Datasheet, FC (decimal ID is 252) should correspond to “Read ECC Count

PS: Thanks to fellow forum member @tide~ for collecting CDI screenshots

The rest of the post by kevin335200 can be found HERE

It is recommended that if the serial number is within the range below, but SMART has not yet reported 0E, it should also be detected by a full scan of Samsung Magician. There are cases where the 0E count is increased after scanning (PM9A1 and other OEM disks that cannot call Magician can be detected by DiskGenius or other software bad blocks. Function replacement). Note: Please try to back up important data before the full scan. If there is a problem with the flash memory itself, there is a very small chance that the disk will be lost during the scan process. A large number of counts/count increase has nothing to do with this incident, please do not Anxiety: 0F count may increase in case of NVMe controller command execution failure, which may just be caused by some insignificant reason:

• PM9A1： S63JNF0R / S63JNX0T / S64JNE0R / S65XNF0R / S675NF0R / S676NF0R / S676NX0R / S677NF0R / S6W7NF0R
• 870 EVO： S5Y2NJ0N / S5Y2NJ0R / S5Y3NF0R / S5Y3NG0R / S621NG0R / S625NJ0R / S626NF0R / S626NJ0R / S62BNJ0R / S62CNF0R / S62CNJ0R / S6BANJ0R / S6BBNG0R / S6BCNG0R / S6BCNJ0R / S6PTNZ0R / S6PUNF0R
• 970 EVO： S464NB0K / S465NF0K / S466NF0K / S466NX0K / S466NX0M / S5H7NS0N / S5H9NS0N
• 970 EVO PLUS： S6P7NG0R / S6P7NF0T
• 980： S649NF0R / S649NF1R / S649NG0R / S649NJ0R / S649NX0R / S64ANG0R / S64DNF0R
• 980 PRO: S5GXNF0R/S5GXNF0T/S5GXNG0N/S5GYNX0R/S69ENF0R/S69ENG0R/S6B0NG0R

Finding further instances of those potentially impacted by this firmware issue has been a little tougher. Reddit poster SourceHansSerf summed it up best in his Reddit post here 5 months ago with “I tried searching in English, but it seems that nobody fell victim to this issue recently. While it is possible that the issue somehow occurs only in certain batches of SSD manufactured and/or sold in China, this problem could also exist globally, but remain undiscovered in regions outside China as it’s rather covert.”. As, despite it being almost half a year later, users that could be potentially affected could be well under the write rate/hours/trigger that seems to cause this health drop, as well as many users being much less frequent with SSD firmware updates (compared with software updates for client software/hardware in every day direct use, eh phones, consoles, etc).

How is Samsung Responding to reports of SSD failures right now?

It should be highlighted that although coverage of this over in the east (going quite widespread on Tieba – the Chinese equivalent of Reddit) this has only recently emerged as a growing concern for users in the west. Aside from the noise that is being made by pudget systems, there is little other large hardware service provider or Samsung associated partner that has raised these issues online – leading some to question until recently if this is related to a bad batch that was only sold in the Eastern regions. Now that a prominent U.S platform has raised the matter related to its user base, with Puget stating:

“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.”

If you have a Samsung SSD that you believe might be affected by this firmware issue, it is MASSIVELY recommended 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. In other words, if you drive is already showing bad sectors or is in a Read-Only state, you will need to contact Samsung and begins a support RMA/replacement claim with them, under your 5-year included warranty.

How Can a PS5 User Check and Update the Firmware of their Samsung 980 Pro SSD?

Now, the impact of this news on PS5 console owners who are using the Samsung 980 Pro as their storage expansion drive are (understandably) a pinch concerned how/if this will impact them. Given the fact that Siny officially enabled the storage feature on the PS5 in Autumn/Winter 2021, any Samsung Models produced after this date SHOULD have a later firmware onboard that is not impacted by this. However, if you are using a Samsung 980 Pro that was manufactured with the 3B2QGXA7 firmware and you have not updated the firmware yet, it is recommended that you update it to the latest revision. However, for console users, this is easier said than done.

Note: Firmware ‘4B2QGXA7’ is NOT affected by the firmware issue.

How to update the firmware of the PS5 Expansion Samsung 980 Pro SSD?

Annoyingly, it is NOT possible to check/update the firmware on an SSD inside the PS5, as the PS5 software is a closed system. Equally, you cannot remove the SSD and put it inside an external enclosure/docking station that is connected via USB or Thunderbolt, as you need to connect an SSD directly to the motherboard for the system to access the controller onboard the SSD to check and/or run an update package. You MIGHT be able to put the SSD in an enclosure that you connect via USB, run CrystalDiskMark and see the FW revision – but this si not guaranteed. You definitely will not be able to update the firmware this way. You will need to connect the SSD to a PC’ with an available M.2 PCIe (not M.2 SATA) slot. You can find out more about the firmware update process in the video below OR skip ahead to HERE in the video in a new tab and follow the instructions).

REALLY IMPORTANT! Connecting an SSD that was inside the PS5, into a PC might result in the PC requesting permission to initialize/format the drive – DO NOT DO THIS unless you are happy to have the disk data deleted (i.e you have a backup)! You should be able to view the drive in CrystalDiskInfo and Samsung Magician without initializing or formatting it to windows.Also, handle the drive carefully (static electricity etc) and do not attempt this unless you are comfortable with the installation process. It may well be that you have ok firmware in place already.

 

As mentioned several times in the article (and on the linked sources), complete details on this are quite spread out and full confirmation of the firmware issues is not clear right now. This article serves as a heads-up that you should check your firmware and, where appropriate, update to the latest revision! Also, Backup, Backup, BACKUP!

 

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