SamSung 960 Evo Firmware Update 3B7QCXE7 and 2.3 NVME Drivers

Discussion in 'SSD and HDD storage' started by KyleStilkey, Nov 11, 2017.

  1. ScorchedHands

    ScorchedHands Guest

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    I installed both updates last night and have been getting drive freezes (100% activity, system locked) and controller resets (which stop the freeze for a few moments. Uninstalling the 2.3 driver (I had the 2.2 installed before) and going to the Microsoft NVMe driver seems to have fixed the issue. Anyone else experiencing this? I did notice the drive is significantly faster with NVMe 2.3 driver, (~2700 read vs ~2000 read) so I want to get it working.

    x299 chipset with an i9-7800X, samsung 960 Pro 1TB
     
  2. TomKansasCity

    TomKansasCity Guest

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    Found this tread because I took a massive speed hit when upgrading to the newest firmware. I would suggest others be extremely cautious. After the firmware upgrade I went from 3200mbs to around 1800 ..... horrible horrible performance loss. Very upset at the moment. I'm going to assume at the point this was purposely done in some sort of attempt to get me to go and buy a newer / faster Samsung product. Nothing else was changed within my OS or bios settings on the motherboard. I wiped my drive and installed a fresh OS install, newest drivers, etc and .... same horrible performance. 1800mbs was what I used to get on my old Intel 600p NVMe drive. My Girlfriends WD Black NVMe gets around 2100mbs. I'm going to have to sell the drive and re-purchase or RMA. RMA sounds like it will end up being a nasty experience. I did find the old firmware and may attempt to reflash back to the older firmware but not sure if I will be allowed to do that.
     
  3. TomKansasCity

    TomKansasCity Guest

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    With my 2nd attempt I was able to get into Samsungs live chat via their website and from the pull down menu there is absolutely nothing about Samsung Sold State Drives so apparently it's not a category they wish to provide support for. Initially when I did my Google search for Samsung Live support the link took me to their Australian Live Help where "Hard Drives / Solid State Drives" had it's own category. I had no idea I was talking to Samsung's Aussie support until the woman told me I was and that she couldn't help me.

    Anyone know how to flash back to the old firmware manually and or had any luck with this? This is something I want to try before dumping my 500GB Samsung EVO NVMe on craigslist or Facebook marketplace.
     
  4. TomKansasCity

    TomKansasCity Guest

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    Tired another PC, confirmed, drive purposely had it's performance down graded. got 1760mbs vs the 3200+mbs I was just getting prior to the new firmware
     

  5. Agent-A01

    Agent-A01 Ancient Guru

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    Did you secure erase it before trying performance?
     
  6. TomKansasCity

    TomKansasCity Guest

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    Yes I did a secure wipe. As others are reporting here, there is a performance loss with the new firmware. I found a few other forum postings with people having the same performance issues.

    For the hell of it I took out my GF's WD black NVMe and replaced it with my Samsung 960 EVO. I did benches before and after and again, I lost around 37% performance. Drive read is obviously slower now. I was currently playing Fallout 4 and saw the difference right away.

    So this is now 3 machines I put the same ssd into. I still have a laptop I can perform the test on as well.

    I'm just not very happy about this at all. There is still a part of me that is in denial and trying to convince myself I'm at fault somehow.

    Installed into 3 machines, uninstall and reinstall of different drivers, new and old. New OS install. Also tried resetting the bios as well as placing the SSD in a different M.2 slot. etc etc. All this was done In no particular order but I did perform all these tasks.

    I've already listed my SSD on Craigslist / Facebook Marketplace. Hope to sell it in the coming days and to repurchase the drive. Hopefully this little mistake won't cost me more than $30 or $40 dollars all said and done.
     
  7. tsunami231

    tsunami231 Ancient Guru

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    this is why you dont do FW upgrade unless something is wrong, same for BIOS updates
     
  8. Agonist

    Agonist Ancient Guru

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    Well wonder why I lost no performance on my drive.
    Its the same as when I bought it.
    I just have gotten lucky as I did the update as well.
     
  9. TomKansasCity

    TomKansasCity Guest

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    I agree but when you have the app telling you there is a FW update available along with the wording "fixes stability and performance" issues or something to that effect what do you do? Perhaps Samsung should remove this feature. Out of sight, out of mind.
     
  10. Chastity

    Chastity Ancient Guru

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    What should the performance speed be on a NVMe PCIe Gen3 x2 port?
     

  11. Agent-A01

    Agent-A01 Ancient Guru

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    Gen 3 single link is 8gbps, so 16gbps is 2000mb/s. Minus overhead which would put it around 1600-1800mb/s
     
  12. As Agent-A01 said, when I installed my 960 EVO in PCI-E v2 slot transfers were around ~1800 mb/s, switching to PCI-E v3 increased it to ~3200 mb/s
     
  13. Chastity

    Chastity Ancient Guru

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    Reason I ask is that it sounds like this could be the reason for the OP's speed issue. Maybe his setup is initializing his M.2 slot as PCIe 3 x2 instead of x4. Firmware bug on his port?
     
  14. Krakkan

    Krakkan Member

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    My 960 EVO 250GB is running 3B7QCXE7 with no issues at all, also got Samsungs NVMe driver (2.3) installed.

    Updated: Ive noticed my Crystaldiskmark scores are a bit slower now, especially when using PrimoCache its about 4GB/sec slower!!

    960 EVO 250GB FW 3B7QCXE7 NVMe 2.3 No PrimoCache:
    [​IMG]
    960 EVO 250GB FW 3B7QCXE7 NVMe 2.3 WITH PrimoCache 2.7.3 (current system):
    [​IMG]
    960 EVO 250GB FW it came with bought MS NVMe WITH PrimoCache 2.7.3:
    [​IMG]
    960 EVO 250GB FW it came with bought NVMe 2.3 WITH PrimoCache 2.7.3: (No pic)
    Was about 11GB/sec read and 10GB/Sec write, faster then the MS driver.

    I'm very sorry i don't have a picture for the last benchmark and that i don't know what firmware it had when the drive was bought.
    But what is clear from all this is that firmware 3B7QCXE7 has slowed down the drive by alot for me when using PrimoCache, by a minimum of 4132MB/sec read and 3964MB/sec write!

    Edit: What i wrote here previously was my fault not seeing difference in write and read in HDTune for a benchmark thaqt i thought was weird :p
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2017
  15. ATOJAR

    ATOJAR Member Guru

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    So im running the Samsung NVM driver version 2.3 and also Samsung Magician version 5.1. When i run Samsung Magician it says i have the latest firmware version 2B6QCXP7?

    Also i dont know if im being really stupid here but withing Windows>Device Manager>Disk drives it reports my driver as being a Microsoft driver from back in 2006?

    I have a 512GB 960 Pro.
     

  16. Agent-A01

    Agent-A01 Ancient Guru

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    It's not under disk it's under "samsung nvme controller" < storage controllers.
     
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  17. Zacarna

    Zacarna Guest

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    Hellooooo to all!
    Who did the firmware upgrade will have had experience of computer freeze, sometime.
    To me happen already three times and you have just the choice to push the RESET button, no way.
    This is the reason why someone have its Magician software stating the 2B6QCXP7 is the last one: Samsung retired the last 3B firmware due to a bug, and what seems to be funny is the rollback is not possible, you'll have to live with your random freezes until Samsung will not release a new firmware correcting the problem

    Here the news

    For the new 2.3 driver, fortunately I had a Ghost, because updating my system the results is a BSOD with no chances
     
    Last edited: Dec 17, 2017
  18. xrodney

    xrodney Master Guru

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    It does not matter if you copy one or 100 files, all that matter is your SLC write speed vc 300MB/s that evo have limit between SLC cache and MLC storage.
    If your SLC cache is 20GB then:
    write speed |SLC cache full after
    400 MB/s | 80GB
    600 MB/s | 40GB
    800 MB/s | 32GB
    1300 MB/s | 26GB
    1800 MB/s | 24GB
     
  19. waltc3

    waltc3 Maha Guru

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    Just installed a 250GB 960 EVO yesterday, taking the place of my Sata3 EVO 850 boot drive, which the wife is now using, and running Crystal Diskmark 6.0, here are my numbers:

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo
    Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    * MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
    * KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

    Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 3032.793 MB/s
    Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1489.747 MB/s
    Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 1) : 284.722 MB/s [ 69512.2 IOPS]
    Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 1) : 331.317 MB/s [ 80887.9 IOPS]
    Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 373.246 MB/s [ 91124.5 IOPS]
    Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 331.645 MB/s [ 80968.0 IOPS]
    Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 43.179 MB/s [ 10541.7 IOPS]
    Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 134.933 MB/s [ 32942.6 IOPS]

    Test : 1024 MiB [C: 65.9% (137.7/209.0 GiB)] (x2) [Interval=5 sec]
    Date : 2018/04/06 17:22:59
    OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 17133] (x64)
    ____________________________________________________________________

    This is with the latest bios 3B7QCXE7, running Magician 5.2 and Samsung NVMe driver 2.3--no gimmicky caches running...;) I will note, however, that right after installing Magician 5.2 but before installing the Samsung NVMe driver 2.3.0.1709, that my top read speed was ~1500; with write about the same--running the Samsung Magician benchmark--and I did not see > 3000 MB/s in that bench as well as Crystal Diskmark until after installing the Samsung NVMe driver and rebooting. Also, when I first installed the drive I formatted it and initially ran the test with no data written to disk--and the above numbers happened after I had cloned my 850 to the 960, installed the Samsung NVMe 2.3 driver, and rebooted from the EVO 960 as c:\.

    At first I also thought the drive was running slow, but apparently it took the drivers and some reboots for it to correctly autoconfigure itself for maximum performance in my x370 PCIe 3 x4 m.2 slot. Or so it would seem...!
     

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