New 960 Pro Firmware

[Micrornd]

Any idea why the 4B6QCXP7 firmware for the Samsung 960 Pro NVMe is only available through the Samsung Magician?
It's been over a month since mine was upgraded and that firmware is still not available on the Samsung site.
No problems, does bench slightly faster, but not enough to matter.
(Don't confuse this with the defective 3B6QCXP7, that was pulled from circulation)

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

I would guess an attempt to force migration to using the Magician tool and/or providing limited rollout initially.

As far as tools and utilities go, I think Magician is one of the better ones for small footprint and being well behaved in the terms of background usage while running and not having any impact when you have it turned off. It's also pretty useful, more useful than most or all SSD tools I've used from other brands.

 

[EXCellR8]

I'd actually rather get firmware through Magician... reason being downloading and flashing manually can be time-consuming and isn't always reliable. Even if you download from the site and confirm compatibility, small microcode revision changes in posted versions could cause further headaches.

I can vouch for Magician too, as I've not really ever had a problem with it.

 

[razel]

Agree with Xabanak… Be glad it isn't like the Crucial/Micron one that runs a damn web server on your machine. I'm sure that it's just a cut down version of their enterprise software, but still... damn. Also just uninstall the Samsung software after you are done. Installing/uninstalling is so much faster and easier with SSDs.

 

[Billy Tallis]

I've always found Samsung Magician's firmware update process to be more of a nuisance than a decent command line tool. In particular, I hate how Magician (last time I used it) tries to force the machine to reboot after a firmware update. This isn't actually necessary, as the drive can be reset by putting the system to sleep (S3) and waking it up again, or by hot-swapping the drive (for SATA). When I have a batch of drives to update, it's annoying to have to fire up Magician, update a drive, kill the process before it triggers a reboot, then swap in the next drive and start Magician again.

 

[Micrornd]

Guys, This wasn't intended to be a "Magician debate". 😵

Firmware updates have been released to "Magician" before the website in the past, but the real question was why it was still not available through the normal website after well over a month, why there has been no notice or acknowledgement by Samsung of it existing or why (what it fixes or changes) and if this is a policy change for delivery of future firmware updates.😉

 

[ch33zw1z]

1. I would speculate it's to avoid standard user errors, and to control the process a bit

2. Reboot the machine when it wants to after the update. This isn't some Enterprise class storage device that uptime is crucial. Do the update when you can reboot.

3. Crucials management software is fine. It doesn't hog resources, and the only issue I've run into is the Ubiquiti controller software can interfere unless you turn one or the other off first. One at a time.

You guys sound like divas 🙂

 

[Carfax83]

FYI, if the new firmware update isn't showing up, it's probably because your Samsung Magician needs to be updated. That's how it was in my case at least.

 

[eddieobscurant]

Any idea why the 4B6QCXP7 firmware for the Samsung 960 Pro NVMe is only available through the Samsung Magician?
It's been over a month since mine was upgraded and that firmware is still not available on the Samsung site.
No problems, does bench slightly faster, but not enough to matter.
(Don't confuse this with the defective 3B6QCXP7, that was pulled from circulation)

Did you previously updated to the defective 3B6QCXP7 ? Maybe the 4B6QCXP7 was intended for those already updated to the faulty 3B6QCXP7.

 

[Micrornd]

Did you previously updated to the defective 3B6QCXP7 ? Maybe the 4B6QCXP7 was intended for those already updated to the faulty 3B6QCXP7.

No, I didn't