Samsung 980 Pro NVMe Failure and how to stop it from happening!

all right so no doubtedly by now you've probably heard about the Samsung 980 Pro 2 terabyte nvme failures that have kind of been making their way around um turns out I had one of the drives that was on its way out so I figured we would go ahead and make a video today talking about quickly an overview of what the problem is and if you have this drive or you're looking at buying this drive how you can make sure that the nvme drive failure is not something you find yourself being a victim of the new Sky tube mid tower case from montec features improved direct airflow with fine mesh intakes three pre-installed rx120 argb fans supports motherboards all the way up to eatx while supporting top mounted 360 radiators and even fits the largest 40 series gpus on the market all while not breaking the bank to see the full list of features follow the sponsored Link in the description below [Music] okay so a quick overview of what's Happening Here Puget systems out in Washington is actually the company that really sort of spearheaded the research as to what's going on here with the nvme drive so this 980 Pro right here that has a Micro Center sticker on it we've had this for a while now in fact the manufacturer date on this is uh 816 2021 so August 16th 2021 quite a while ago this one was manufactured in Korea interestingly enough we just picked these two drives up today at Micro Center because I went through the whole process of updating and fixing this drive so it wouldn't fail on me and went oh I should have probably made a video about that so I went and picked up two new drives that probably are not going to have the firmware issue on it because one they're manufactured in December of 2022 and they're made in Vietnam and not in Korea so the they I don't know if they have the firmware issue so first and foremost here let's talk about what the problem is the problem is with the firmware itself the firmware on the drive remember there's a controller that controls the nand so the nand is just sitting there waiting for blocks to be written on the nand and the controller is what controls where those blocks get ridden it moves those blocks around to keep Drive help with stuff going and the problem is that there was a particular firmware on the 980 Pro that was actually corrupting portions of the drive and it was happening slowly over time but as those errors would continue to accumulate and accumulate and accumulate the smart Drive Health looked at the drive as if it's failing and so what it does with an SSD is it reverts it once it sees enough failures and a certain percentage of the drive is no longer looking healthy it locks the drive into a read-only state now if you're using the drive for an OS drive that's obviously a problem because your OS is constantly writing and reading from the drive so if it can't write anymore your OS would then become corrupted and you would see blue screens maybe even a no post all sorts of weird issues would happen with the drive if you're using it as a secondary drive that has games and stuff on it well your games would probably no longer work because it can't write to save files and stuff if they're on the same drive so a lot can obviously happen negatively if the OS or the program that is using the drive can no longer write to it now this is an issue happening with the firmware it's not actually corruption on the nand itself it's corruption with the controller and the firmware writing to the different blocks of data on the drive um once your drive goes into that failure State there's no getting it back once the drive believes it has failed and goes into a right only protected or excuse me read only protected State there's no getting it back there's no firmware flashing it's basically toast at that point now it's kind of funny because the research showed as many as 9 000 errors on a drive that is very young and very high health and I think it said once it gets to about I think it was 33 000 failures or somewhere around there I could put on the screen that's when it would revert into a read-only state now there are three firmwares I said three there are three firmwares there's three firmwares that you need to be aware of the drives that are specifically most affected by this the drives that were most prone to failure are the Samsung 980 Pro nvme Gen 4 2 terabyte drives manufactured in 2021 and having a firmware that started with the number three you don't have to know the whole firmware we'll put it down right here on the screen Phil can put it on the screen but there's three firmwares one starts with a three one starts with a four and one starts with a five the one that starts with the three is the one that basically your drive was guaranteed to have a one-way ticket to failure town and guess what firmware my drive had and this is the drive that I was putting on my personal rig so I was like oh do I want to use this drive so it's not my OS drive it is my secondary drive that I'm using in the system now that I've updated the firmware and I'm going to take a chance on it for my steam library and all that sort of stuff so anyway what you need to do to get this flashed back and or not flashback but firmware updated is you have to install it physically in a system so I tried doing this on a card reader an nvme card reader the problem is the card reader is just a translator that turns the nvme into a USB device now it can't write to the drive firmwares and such by being a read or excuse me a USBC you know transcoded device so it has to be physically installed in the system so that's the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to install it if it's already in your system which it may be um it's gonna be a lot more convenient for you because it's already in there it doesn't matter if it's going to be the OS drive or a secondary drive or a mass storage drive just chilling there it has to be physically in an m.2 slot on your motherboard to be able to go forward with the next steps so the nvme is installed in the m.2 slot here at the bottom of the motherboard and you'll notice when I come into Windows here it's not showing up this is my OS Drive yeah it's only a 500 gigabyte drive and this is a two terabyte hard drive which I have in here look my test bench is old okay anyway the two terabyte nvme drive is not showing up right here so that's because it's a brand new drive that has no format or partition or anything on there you may have to go to Disk Management this is only for those that are installing a brand new one by the way it automatically shows up hit OK expand it you'll see right here right click new simple volume click next you can give it a drive letter the amount it's going to drive each or whatever all the defaults finish now the drive shows up there it is and there it is right there so this is only for those that are maybe installing one for the first time in their OS if you already have it installed I've been using it that's not going to matter what we need to download right now is a utility called Samsung magician so once I go ahead and download the software make sure you download the one that is specific for your particular OS and such so I'm using the consumer grade all right the installer is just about to finish right here I'm going to tell it to go ahead and launch the software now here's the thing if your firmware is at a date it'll automatically prompt you when it recognizes it's a Samsung drive and the firmware is out of date um so scanning drive right here update your firmware to the latest version for operational stability and I have actually multiple ssds in here that are Samsung one is a SATA drive it shows up right there as the 860e though that's a SATA drive this is the 980 Pro is our actual um nvme and then it even shows the Western Digital Drive right there which is uh my two terabyte black anyway it notices that there's an update that needs to be handled now it's telling me that right now specifically for the 860 Evo which is which is fine it shows Drive details there's that let's look at our 980 Pro okay so we are on the latest version that the 5B 2q gxa7 that's the latest one if you have a firmware that starts with a three it's going to be very important to update your bios if you have the one that starts with a four or the five which is the latest here you're gonna be fine because all of the failures have been um kind of showing up on the older drives now here's the thing we just went and bought these drives which means that they are good because of the same manufacturer date they're from the same location I expect them all to be running on the same firmware and we'll double I'll double check that not off camera obviously but because they're identical um everything I expect them to be on the same firmware if you need to update your firmware though you'll get a notice like this go to drive details you'll see an update button right here it is very important on your 980 Pro if you're worried about being one of the drives that is potentially going to fail then you need to look at your drive details and see if it starts with a three it will put the whole firmware right here and you have a two terabyte drive and it was manufactured in 2021 and it's gonna be hard for you to tell the manufacturer data is if you've got rid of the box it is on the drive but if it's installed in your system obviously that'll be hard to see that drive is on a one-way ticket to failure town now one thing you can also do just to make sure your your drive is okay here is do a diagnostic scan just a short scan is fine it's going to go through and prepare the entire drive for scanning each one of those squares is basically a block of where data gets re read and written to what was happening is some drives with the bad firmware the corrupted firmware was showing even without being used yet like fresh out of the box a few red squares and that's specifically due to the firmware so once It prepares the entire thing and go ahead and read it takes about 53 seconds to do the entire thing it's funny it's that granular of detail it's correct 53 seconds is how long it takes but you can go through and check your drive status if you've been running a Samsung 980 Evo or excuse me a 980 Pro 2 terabyte nvme SSD in your system for a while before you update the firmware I would highly recommend you run this test just to know whether or not any of your your blocks are showing up red already red as in bad so not read but red red now don't worry if that's the case that was your firmware slowly taking your SSD on that one-way trip once you update the firmware and go through the drive diagnostic again it actually will fix those sectors because that is a corrupted firmware not actual corrupted corrupted sectors on the net it's important to note that so everything is good right here um and I like I said I would expect the other drive to be the same I really wish I had made this video yesterday because of the fact that this drive right here that's when I hold my hand checked every single box that was like if you have these you have a problem and guess what yes this absolutely is one of those drives it is fixed now and it is in my personal rig so I'm going to be using that drive I'm going to go ahead and update the a60 Evo now just so you can see the process here so Drive details update you can click update again check system compatibility for performance okay it's going to shut down automatically after it does this why because after it updates the firmware you have to restart the drive to restart the controller the actual update process is very it's already done like it wrote that fast so we can just say shut down notice it's not a restart it is a full shutdown it wants a power cycle on the drive the same thing is going to happen with your nvme whether it's the OS drive or a game drive or a picture drive or a scratch drive whatever it is going to do the same thing it's just taking forever to shut down because this system is very old and it has had lots of different Hardware put through the same OS and lots of registry issues because it's it's time to change our test benches and stuff here and then once you go back into the SSD magician software from Samsung you'll no longer see the update button until there's a new update for it so if you're worried about the 980 failure I had a lot of people email me about this and I know a lot of people talked about this already but having another point of information that could potentially reach someone that has a strive and is worried about it failing because look nothing sucks more than losing your data and I'm sure there's plenty of you I guarantee someone right now is watching this video didn't know about this error has a drive made in 2021 is a two terabyte drive and is sitting on the firmware starting with a three and might even have some Red Blocks showing up so it's easy to fix as long as it hasn't reached that complete failure State once it goes into that com that right or that read state only that's it your drive is toast it is forever locked in time at whatever that data is showing on there all right thanks for watching guys hope this has helped someone kind of a short quick one now I've got a multi multiple 980 evos here I was hoping I paid I paid over 300 bucks for these drives to hope to show you guys how to do it but I showed you still how to do it I just didn't actually have to perform it thanks for watching guys hit like to subscribe to at least support the fact that I spent 300 bucks on something I didn't need help to show you something that I had to tell you in theory how it works

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 486,040

Keywords: 980, 980 pro, 980 evo, 980 pro ssd, 980 pro ssd failure, 2tb ssd, samsung 980, samsung 980 failure, 980 ssd firmware, how to update 980 pro, how to update 980 pro firmware, how to fix 980 pro ssd

Id: DoAFzdz0h5M

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023