SSD Samsung 990 Evo Failed Status

[Spaneta]

AFAIK (never tried) Samsung's ISOs usually don't work. Do a web-search "samsung iso not working"

Sorry but this is not a very reliable "proof" because for any piece of HW or SW you will always see people claiming "this don't work" but nobody (_except_ in situation like this thread) will claim "Hey I used this with success".

From my experience with the method I described, 8 different firmware ISO's for 8 different 800/900 models, 11drives total in 11 different PC's and the only time it "fails" I had to follow the recommendation of Samsung to hot-unplug-replug the drive and relaunch the update and that worked.

Probably some failures are due to some BIOS settings, enabled TPM / Secure boot or drives in "Frozen" state that where not identified as the root cause but blaming globally the Samsung's ISO's for the failures seems unfair IMHO. Especially after I have dealt ONE time (and NEVER agin) with a firmware ISO from WD ... impossible to upgrade firmware of a NVMe SSD (202x era) without (guess what) a PS/2 keyboard (yes, those from beginning of the 2000's). Even some old MB from end of the 1990's with only USB 1.x support USB keyboard out of the box to configure BIOS, ...

EDIT: by NEVER agin I wanted to say I hope I never have to use an ISO for firmware update by WD, like 200 MB instead of 16-20 MB from Samsung's ISO, but don't work the way you expect it ...

 

[Spaneta]

Hello @Ramalama,

I think you misunderstood some points I summarized.

The firmware problems in Samsung 980 Pro/990 Pro were mainly due to bad "reading" or bad "interpretation" of values, not that the _real_ values where wrong. So even if the drives were correctly cooled - like the way you explained - the firmware still may think the drive is too hot (or too wearout) and then trigger an unrecoverable error state or read-only status thus "failing" the drive. This leads to a high probability of "same cause, same consequence" without any sample variance of the production mitigating the risk. And contrary to what you seem to suggest, the 980 Pro were also impacted at some time. For the 990 Pro there is also different batch of production (like for other SSD's) and some problems may have been corrected only after some HW revision, like for anything from MB to cars.

Where I strongly embrace your point is when some products deeply change without changing the model name, like it was the case for the CMR to SMR migration of WD Red non-Plus/non-Pro HDD (and others). These sh*tty decisions impede on the quality-trust towards the maker. And trust is far faster lost than gained back ...

Have a nice day,

EDIT: forgot to paste THIS link as example for the 980 Pro