It was in mid-December when Samsung launched the new 980 Pro storage drives. They are M.2 format SSD drives that work through the PCIe 4.0 interface. This unit offers us a reading speed of up to 7000 MB/s and a writing speed of up to 5000 MB/s, being one of the most powerful on the market today.
Samsung corrects the errors of its new SSDs through firmware
The SSDs integrate the SMART technology which, among other things, allows you to monitor the status of the storage unit. Such technology is important, as SSDs degrade faster than HDDs. Specifically, reading processes and, above all, writing, affect the integrity of the unit.
These Samsung 980Pro have launched with firmware 3B2QGXA7which presents problems, mainly, in the 2TB drives. It should be noted that units with lower capacity also present this problem, but to a lesser extent.
The first error is related to the value “0E”which is the indicator of “integrity error and a half” which seems to activate erroneously. It also activates value “03” which indicates the “replacement available” with a value less than 100. If you don’t know how to access this data, you can do it with the CrystalDisk Info software.
There are many users who in the value “0E” reports a value over 2000 and in some cases it has shot above 32000. This error causes the drive to lock itself to protect itself and become read only, preventing writing. Also, the value “03” happened to be by below 5% after use and with a write of few TB.
Of course, the values ”0E” and “03” mean that, if a certain value is passed, make the drive read-only. Prevents writing to continue memory degradation and thus protect user data. It allows the user to extract the information, which is important.
Samsung has released the firmware 5B2QGXA7, that correct these two problems mentioned. But there is a problem and that is, if the SSD unit has entered read-only mode, the situation cannot be reversed. We will only be able to read the data from the drive, we will not be able to use it to store new data.
A big problem for users
Currently, if you have a Samsung 980 Pro and have not seen this problem, you should update as soon as possible. To do this, you must use the Samsung Magician software, which allows you to update the firmware to the latest version. If you are affected, you should make a copy (if you can) of the critical data and process the guarantee.
This is a critical problem that should not occur, especially in such a prominent company in the SSD industry. But, on the other hand, it is the first time (that we are aware of) that something of this nature has happened. The normal thing is that Samsung, when it receives the RMA of these units, changes them directly.
On the other hand, once again the need to have a backup of critical information is evident. Any file (photos, documents, videos, etc.) of high value that we have should have a copy in an unconnected drive. Thus, in case of any problem, we have a backup of important data and the drama is minimized.
