Samsung botches 960 Pro SSD firmware update

It’s no secret that Samsung continuously impresses us with its line of SSDs, however its latest update might have botched it for owners of Samsung's 960 Pro drives. Reports have been cropping up that its latest firmware is causing instability across the board, and while Samsung is aware of the problem, it might not receive an immediate fix.

Luckily, Samsung 960 Pro owners haven’t been reporting hard-crashing just yet, although lagging and freezing seems to now be commonplace for the device, causing operating systems to take several seconds before catching up and resuming ordinary functions.

The reports are coming across many different outlets, unsurprisingly including Samsung’s very own forums, which detail the 960 Pro getting lumbered with 100% activity readings withing Windows’ Task Manager, alongside read and write speeds of 0. Alternatively, other users are experiencing performance degradation of up to 1,400 MB/s in read speeds when attempting to benchmark the drive under the new firmware.

Samsung has been prowling its forums, collecting information from affected users to determine the cause and potential solution. Users running SSD Optimisation modes while running Perfect Disk have managed to recreate the issue, which the company has taken on board, however it might not deem the problem widespread enough to address in a timely manner.

As a warning to Samsung 960 Pro users, firmware updates cannot be rolled back to a previous version. Once you take the plunge, you’re stuck with any problems that might come with it until fully addressed and patched out by the company itself. In that light, it might be best to wait until Samsung has decided whether or not it will fix this issue any time soon.

KitGuru Says: It might not seem all that reassuring that Samsung isn’t committed to solving the problem right away, but the more people that speak up, the more the company will have to address it. If you are experiencing a problem, your best bet is to head over to the Samsung Forums and make it known.

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