Samsung 830-Series SSD Firmware Update May Brick Your Drive

Samsung has managed to build quite a reputation for itself in the SSD industry thanks to its high-quality drives that seemed to be far more reliable than their SandForce-based counterparts, but recently even Samsung has run into some troubles with its SSDs.

These were uncovered just recently by a user of the Overclock.net forum who, when trying to upgrade the firmware of its 830-series SSD to the latest version, got a BSOD that made the drive undetectable to the system.

When it contacted Samsung about this problem, the company replied that this is a common issue with the firmware update and that the only solution available is to RMA the drive.

Little is known about what causes these problems, but some users have reported, including the one who started the thread on Overclock.net, that reconnecting the drive or letting it sit for a while can return it back to life.

These problems seem to appear no matter the method used for connecting the drive to the system, USB or SATA.

Samsung has introduced the 830-series of solid state drives in the second half of last year as the successor of the popular 470-series that was extremely popular among OEMs.

Compared to its predecessor the 830-series delivers far better performance as is capable of reaching read transfer speeds of up to 500MB/s.

Samsung had to introduce two major changes in the 830 series SSDs in order to achieve these impressive speeds.

The first one is of course the support for the SATA 6Gbps interface, while the latter is the introduction of 2x-nm Toggle NAND Flash support, which will also help drive prices down similarly to what Intel has experienced when it switched to 25nm IMFT Flash.

Samsung’s SATA 6Gbps SSDs are available in 512GB, 256GB, 128GB and 64GB densities with prices starting at $136.99 (99 Euros).