Samsung releases firmware updates to fix rapid health drops on premium SSDs
Samsung has released firmware updates that address rapid health deterioration in two of its premium SSDs.
Samsung first rolled out firmware update 5B2QGXA7 to fix issues with the 980 Pro and started pushing the 980 Pro 1B2QJXD7 firmware patch to users over the past weekend.
In the past few months, numerous owners of the SSDs complained about faster-than-normal health declines on their drives.
Tom’s Hardware reported on many users flagging their 990 Pro SSD health drops on the Overclock.net forums from December 2022.
Several users said their drive analysis software showed over 10% lower health despite only being used for a few days or weeks.
Samsung rates the 990 Pro for 1,200TBW (Terabytes Written), which means it would take 12TB of written data for the drive to lose 1% health.
But the complainants saw multiple percentage points of health loss despite writing less than 12TB of data to the drive.
It was believed that the fault lay either with Samsung’s hardware or the firmware of the drives, as multiple software tools used for analysing drive health produced the same results.
Although Samsung did not provide any official documentation alongside the firmware updates, a moderator on the company’s European community forums confirmed that the firmware caused the “anomalies”.
Unfortunately, the health degradation suffered up to the point at which the firmware was installed seems to be real.
Users found that although their drive health drops have slowed, the firmware did not reset the reported values to a higher figure.
Tom’s Hardware said if the degradation had indeed occurred, it is likely that Samsung would now be more open to taking the drives from customers and exchanging them for new units, provided they are under warranty.
For those who are not too concerned about their drive’s state up to this point, the firmware updates can be downloaded via the Samsung Magician app.
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