Question Samsung 980 Pro problem

IBMJunkman

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May 7, 2015
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New Z790 system. Win 11 installed on Samsung 980 PRO. Drive has latest firmware. Sitting at the desktop doing nothing. Pops a blue screen. Don't remember message. Reboot and no boot drive. Using a USB-C NVMe dock I connect drive to Win 10 system. Windows beeps but drive never shows up in Disk Manager. After several minutes a Format Drive box pops up.

What are the chances a data recovery place can get the data to a new drive? Don't really relish going through the whole Win 11, SQL, VS, Office, apps, etc install again. Anything else I could try?

Bad first time experience with NVMe drives. :(
 

Tech Junky

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Use a Linux USB boot drive and you might be able to copy the folders over and format the drive for use.
 
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Fernando 1

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Jul 29, 2012
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Bad first time experience with NVMe drives. :(
You issue has probably been caused by the "Intel(R) Chipset Device Software" installer, which has installed a not matching INF file and replaced this way the absolutely required NVMe driver.
My tip: Don't run the Installer of the Intel Chipset Device Software. It is much better to install the missing Intel INF files manually from within the Device Manager.
 

IBMJunkman

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May 7, 2015
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LYou issue has probably been caused by the "Intel(R) Chipset Device Software" installer, which has installed a not matching INF file and replaced this way the absolutely required NVMe driver.
My tip: Don't run the Installer of the Intel Chipset Device Software. It is much better to install the missing Intel INF files manually from within the Device Manager.
Machine has been running for a week with no problem. My problem now is the drive appears to be bricked.
 
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Samsung 980 Pro production batches have had iffy reliability since 2022 AFAIK. I think they fired the entire QA/QC dept. and now some engineers/techies are doing two jobs.

Your bad experience is not with NVMe. It's with Samsung. Hope you go with Crucial P5 next time.
 

In2Photos

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Samsung 980 Pro production batches have had iffy reliability since 2022 AFAIK. I think they fired the entire QA/QC dept. and now some engineers/techies are doing two jobs.

Your bad experience is not with NVMe. It's with Samsung. Hope you go with Crucial P5 next time.
On PCPartPicker the Samsung drive has 10 times the number of reviews over the Crucial. On Amazon it has 3 times the reviews. Both are rated 5 stars on each website. Individual products can be bad. I've yet to experience a bad Samsung drive (out of 10 or so purchased), but I have had a bad Crucial drive (out of 1 that I bought).
 
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but I have had a bad Crucial drive (out of 1 that I bought).
I think that was a QLC based P3?

How many times have you read about other vendors needing to update their firmware? Samsung seems to be the only brand that keeps popping up in the news along with the term firmware. One would think they would have a pretty good handle on how to deal with their own V-NAND flash cells. Remember the 850 Pro? It had legendary TBW of nine petabytes or more and it kept sustaining writes even when it crossed Samsung's official endurance spec. Then someone there got super greedy and created the EVO line that lost data (I have first hand experience of that).

Latest issue was with their brand new 990 Pro. I'm sorry but this sounds like their SSD division has been handed over to some pimp who is too busy managing his primary interests and Samsung SSDs are just an afterthought for him. And I would bet that person got the job coz of nepotism.
 

In2Photos

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I think that was a QLC based P3?

How many times have you read about other vendors needing to update their firmware? Samsung seems to be the only brand that keeps popping up in the news along with the term firmware. One would think they would have a pretty good handle on how to deal with their own V-NAND flash cells. Remember the 850 Pro? It had legendary TBW of nine petabytes or more and it kept sustaining writes even when it crossed Samsung's official endurance spec. Then someone there got super greedy and created the EVO line that lost data (I have first hand experience of that).

Latest issue was with their brand new 990 Pro. I'm sorry but this sounds like their SSD division has been handed over to some pimp who is too busy managing his primary interests and Samsung SSDs are just an afterthought for him. And I would bet that person got the job coz of nepotism.
Nope, TLC based MX500.

I read about a lot of companies that need firmware updates. How many BIOS updates have you performed? Driver updates? How often does your phone get updated? Hell, cars get firmware updates these days, it's nothing new.
 
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Hell, cars get firmware updates these days, it's nothing new.
Not sure what that has to do with other SSD brands not appearing as frequently in the news as Samsung with regards to critical firmware updates. But yeah, I get it. It's subjective. I've had one Samsung bad experience. I'm wary of them. You had one bad experience with Crucial so you are probably going to avoid their SSDs. Seems fair. In the same vein, IBMJunkman should try a different brand.
 

In2Photos

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Not sure what that has to do with other SSD brands not appearing as frequently in the news as Samsung with regards to critical firmware updates. But yeah, I get it. It's subjective. I've had one Samsung bad experience. I'm wary of them. You had one bad experience with Crucial so you are probably going to avoid their SSDs. Seems fair. In the same vein, IBMJunkman should try a different brand.
Actually I would consider Crucial drives again. I almost bought them for my kid's PCs.
 
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Tech Junky

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WD seems to be the least worrisome brand at this point. Everyone knows Seagate is a joke at this point. That leaves SS. The fabs making the chips and controllers these days is quite limited though. There's always going to be a bad batch though and it's up to the companies to catch them before they get into the wild through QA/QC but some do it better than others. I haven't had any issues though with a handful of different vendors when it comes to M2 drives. With the caveat that I don't and won't pay SS premium this none in production at this point.
 

IBMJunkman

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May 7, 2015
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When did you install the Intel Chipset Device Software?
>This< report was the reason for my previous post.
Don't think I did. I am starting the whole install process again with a new NVMe drive. So far the driver for the NVMe drives is a Microsoft one.
 

WilliamM2

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Actually I would consider Crucial drives again. I almost bought them for my kid's PCs.
I'll never buy anything Crucial again. We had several SSD's brick at work, and memory modules too. Only brand for either.

I have a 980Pro from November 2020, been runnng fine, even though I ran the 3rd (bad) firmware for 8 months, until Dec 2021.

Have you secure erased the 980 to make sure it has an issue?
 
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Shmee

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As others have mentioned, if you have any essential data on the drive that was not yet backed up, you can try viewing it / recovering it in Linux, often works better than Windows. Or, if you don't want to take the chance on further corrupting or harming the drive, you could send it for data recovery, but this would be $$$$.

If it is just that programs need to be reinstalled on a new drive with OS, unfortunately there is little to be done to avoid that if you don't have a system image from before the drive crashed. Looks like you just need to set up everything on your new drive again, and then I would recommend making a system image backup to a NAS or external drive.

As for the old 980 Pro, you could return it, or RMA if past the return window, assuming you are not going to try data recovery.
 

IBMJunkman

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Returning to Amazon. Replacement arriving tomorrow.


As others have mentioned, if you have any essential data on the drive that was not yet backed up, you can try viewing it / recovering it in Linux, often works better than Windows. Or, if you don't want to take the chance on further corrupting or harming the drive, you could send it for data recovery, but this would be $$$$.

If it is just that programs need to be reinstalled on a new drive with OS, unfortunately there is little to be done to avoid that if you don't have a system image from before the drive crashed. Looks like you just need to set up everything on your new drive again, and then I would recommend making a system image backup to a NAS or external drive.

As for the old 980 Pro, you could return it, or RMA if past the return window, assuming you are not going to try data recovery.