Honey, I bricked the SSD (950 Pro NVMe)

So I think I broke it last night with a firmware update. Only had about 2.7TB written, so it's not at EOL yet. It's backed up, but I'm without a system for a while obviously - it doesn't detect as "present" in UEFI setup.

I found a stack of articles about 850's bring bricked and also the recovery process by forcing flash from a CD, but nothing for the 950. Anyone have any ideas on recovery before I RMA it? I only have the one and it's a single NVMe board.

 

you shouldn't have a problem if you flashed it through samsung magician.

 

Yeah he shouldn't have a problem... but he does.

 

Unfortunately Magician's only trick was a vanishing trick.

 

Do you remember what revision it was going to flash?

 

No, I didn't see what revision it was (new version of Magician too). Bit careless of me not to dig harder for it.

 

I flashed my 950 pros and it worked fine so it could be a bad stick or something interrupted the flash.

 

Partly related, why do we need to do firmware updates on SSD's? If I install the thing and it works, what benefit is there in updating the firmware?

Not being a smartarse or intentionally dumb, I just am curious and whether I should be doing it...

 

if it aint broke, dont fix it.

peformance and stability are the 2 main reasons for firmware.

if you are happy with both performance and stability on your ssd's then dont touch them!!!!

i have 2x 1tb 850 evo ssd's and i have not bothered to update them, performance is good and never had a stability issue. other issue i have is mine are in raid 0 and as far as im aware you cant update main drives or raided drives, well i couldnt way back in the day when i bothered to try on an 120gb ssd i bought many moons ago.

 

I tend to leave firmware upgrades almost entirely only to the motherboard and never any other hardware. I'm of the opinion, as above leave it alone unless there tends to be an issue.

 

I use a 950 Pro as a main OS drive and it flashed the firmware fine.

 

I usually FW update a brand new SSD and then ignore them forever, unless there's a special reason to update like a significant bugfix or feature addition or something.

If its working, don't break fix it (y)

 

I probably wouldn't especially if its working well, but I did have a major problems with a Crucial BX100 SSD. Each time I would wake from Hibernate or was it SLEEP, well it was one of them, I'd BSOD.. After much googling and trying different things, it was a firmware upgrade on the SSD that solved that one, so sometimes they may just be useful.

 

Because sometimes the fuck shit up and the firmware fixes it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9196/samsung-releases-second-840-evo-fix

 

last flash I did with Samsung magician worked..... until I tried to run any games I had installed.

needed to re-download them again because they were all corrupt so I wont be updating again any time soon!

 

Have you tried booting off a HDD and seeing if Magican can still see it and re-flash? It would probably be a long shot but may be worth a try?

 

Otherwise see if you can claim it under warranty.

 

Thankfully Samsung ignore linux users, so I don't have any option to flash my 950PRO.

Thankfully it's also been faultless 24x7 since installed.

I've got a much older 850PRO too, also 24x7 since installation no problems.


the wild west days of early SSDs are long gone, there's next to no reason to be updating them any more.