Samsung 850 Pro SSD 256 gb slower after firmware update EXM02B6Q. Original firmware EXM01B6Q worked perfect!

[soewhaty]

I contacted the Samsung support in the country where I bought my Samsung SSD [in my case Denmark] and they said they were unable to solve my problem and told me to call 00 800 8010 8011 and the support person there told me to contact samsungmemory@hanaro.eu via email.

I have a notebook laptop HP Pavilion dv7-6b76eo. The laptop came with an HDD, but not long ago I bought the Samsung 850 Pro 256gb SSD MZ-7KE256BW and it worked perfect until today’s firmware update. [Just for the record, the SSD is produced in China, not in Korea. That’s what is says on its box.] After today’s firmware update EXM02B6Q the SSD is now slower according to Samsung Magician’s Performance Benchmarking tool, if we are to trust this! As of yet I cannot notice and real slow down, but I guess I'd trust the fact that Magician is reporting lower speeds and iops. I performed the firmware update while within Windows, from the Magician interface, after which I rebooted to see the effects take place. After the firmware update EXM02B6Q the benchmarking tool shows approx.. seq. read/write 300/500 MB and IOPS 55.000/55.000. Original firmware EXM01B6Q, on the other hand, worked perfect and with it Magician’s benchmark tool showed approx. seq. read/write 520/530 MB and IOPS 90.000/90.000 and that is, according to the product description, how fast the SSD should be! I run Windows 7 x64 Pro +SP1 on the Samsung SSD in question and have the latest updates of everything.

No changes to the settings of the SSD inside or outside the Magician software took place before and after the firmware update. Also, I did a test before the update and speeds were perfect and also did a test after the update and speeds were lower. Clearly before the firmware update the speeds shown in Magician were as they should be and after the firmware update they were not.

I tired reinstalling Magician software, but after reinstalling it I still got the low benchmark results. I also did a bootable CD of the .iso file [found here http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/downloads.html] of the newer EXM02B6Q firmware just to try to re-do the update to see if that helps, but when I booted to the bootable cd all it did for me was to confirm that I already have the latest firmware, so I wasn’t able to re-update the firmware. So I am still stuck with this new and obviously bad firmware. Help is welcome!!!

Could you please provide me with the *.iso file of the original firmware EXM01B6Q and also inform me if yet a newer firmware update, to fix the issues with EXM02B6Q, is going to be out soon?

This here is just one forum out of a few out there showing others having issues with the new firmware update too - http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?p=37195512

 

[mrchips1]

Adjunct to the previous post. Still never received the confirmation e-mail. Not in Spam folder, not in junk folder not no where.. Someone figure this out because I really like this forum.

 

[soewhaty]

Good news for some folks out there. As mentioned, I am from those who somehow survived the madness caused by Samsung's stupidity. The only damage to my 850 pro was that according to Magician the speeds and iops were somewhat halved. 300/500mb and 55k/55k iops. So once with the new fw there was no turning back to the old fw. After reading some tips in the forums I reinstalled the storage drivers and the intel rap. storage tech. stuff and an good improvement was measured in Magician which lead me to think that some files were damaged by the wrong fw update procedure. Just for the record I did my fw update thru the desktop utility in Magician, not thru the dos boot iso. So I had a spare partition on the ssd on which I just installed Windows 7 and guess what .. speeds and IOPS there are back to normal as they are supposed to be - 560/530 and 92k/82k iops. What can I say. For those of you who lost stuff ... just sue them!!!

 

[soewhaty]

If someone would like to copy and paste my above post so I can 'Pick it as solution' to this forum thread it would be nice, because that is basically the answer of the initial post I made to start this whole thread.