Samsung 980 PRO Firmware Update from NixOS

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There seems to be a problem with 980 PRO SSD Firmware, where it can go read-only and from which it won’t be able to recover. There is also a problem on the 990 PRO where the disk health seems to degrade unusually quickly, but there is no firmware update for that at this time. It should however works the same way.

Samsung offers an .ISO (at Samsung Magician & SSD Tools & Software Update | Samsung Semiconductor Global) you can boot into, but that didn’t work on my 12th gen Intel device, so I went and extracted it and did the manually.

As root user execute the following:

cd $(mktemp -d)
wget https://semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/software-resources/Samsung_SSD_980_PRO_5B2QGXA7.iso
mkdir ./iso
mount -o loop Samsung_SSD_980_PRO_5B2QGXA7.iso ./iso
gzip -dc iso/initrd | cpio -div --no-absolute-filenames
nix-shell -p unzip
cd root/fumagician
./fumagician

You’ll find an executable named fumagician in the CWD that will guide you through and do the actual upgrade.

You can see your current firmware version via nix-shell -p nvme-cli --run nvme list as root. The new firmware will be active after reboot.

Good luck.

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@hexa - many thanks!

Anyone know how to handle these in ZFS pools? I can not identify any nvme drives using nvme or the above program.

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Then you likely didn’t execute nvme as root. No special handling of ZFS pools is required.

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@hexa Thanks for the confirmation. I had a weird config issue (doh!), and now fixed that. I also got confused by the negative effect from the fumagician program - which for reference does not show any drives if they are already up to date (rather than listing drives and giving a status of each).

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There’s now also an update for the 990 pro. Can be applied using the same method as in the original post. Of course there’s no changelog :upside_down_face:.

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