It was in mid-December that Samsung launched the new Pro 980 storage drives. These are M.2 format SSD drives that work via 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 fixes the errors of its new SSDs thanks to the firmware
SSDs incorporate SMART Technology which, among other things, allows you to monitor the status of the storage unit. Such technology is important because SSDs degrade faster than HDDs. More precisely, the processes of reading and, especially, of writing, affect the integrity of the unit.
these Samsung 980 Pro launched with firmware 3B2QGXA7which poses problems, mainly, in the 2 TB hard drives. It should be noted that lower capacity units also exhibit 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 by mistake. 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 more than 2000 and in some cases it exceeded 32,000. This error causes the drive to lock up to protect itself and become read-only, preventing writing. Also value “03” happened by below 5%
Of course, the values ”0E” and “03” mean that, if a certain value is passed, make the drive read-only. Prevents writes from further degrading memory and thereby protecting user data. It allows the user to extract the information, which is important.
Samsung released the firmware 5B2QGXA7, What corrected these two problems mention. 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 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 haven’t seen this issue, you should update as soon as possible. To do this, you need to 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 warranty.
This is a critical issue that should not occur, especially in such a big company in the SSD industry. But, on the other hand, this is the first time (to our knowledge) 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 obvious. Any file (photos, documents, videos, etc.) of great value that we have must have a copy in an unconnected unit. So if something goes wrong, we have a backup of important data and the drama is minimized.
