According to Tom’s Hardware, the Samsung 980 Pro SSD, the company’s flagship product launched in August 2020, has seen numerous reports of failures in the SSD over the past few months, to which Samsung has not responded, but custom PC maker Puget Systems has worked with Samsung to roll out new firmware for the affected 980 Pro SSDs to fix the failures after “receiving an alarming number of reports of failures.
The previously problematic Samsung 980 Pro was basically using the 3B2QGXA7, and now Samsung has introduced a new 5B2QGXA7 firmware to fix the problem. The problem mainly affects the 2TB version of the 980 Pro, though some lower capacities can’t be completely avoided. According to user feedback, the SSD’s S.M.A.R.T. is showing “0E” values, even many times, which is the number of times the master has detected an unrecovered data integrity error. In addition, there are cases where the “03” value (available spare space) is below 100%.
A number of users have reported that their SSD 0E values have skyrocketed to 2000+ or even over 32,000, causing the SSD to lock up in read-only mode. Others have reported that their 980 Pro is down to 5% 03 after four months of use, but the SSD is only writing single-digit TBs of space.
According to Puget, the most common issue that users have fed back is that the SSD has gone into read-only mode. Given that most users have their operating system installed on the SSD, the read-only mode makes that boot drive unusable. Unfortunately, once your 980 Pro enters this failure state, there is no way to recover your data, even with a firmware update.
If your SSD is still usable, a new firmware update from Samsung will prevent the failure from occurring in the first place. So if you have a 980 Pro running the 3B2QGXA7 firmware, you’ll want to update to the latest firmware (5B2QGXA7) using Samsung’s SSD Magician software as soon as possible. it.com understands that 980 Pro SSDs running the 4B2QGXA7 or 5B2QGXA7 firmware are not affected by this issue.
