Samsung 960 Pro SSD firmware update causes stability issues

A word of warning for owners of Samsung 960 Pro SSDs. The company recently published firmware version 3B6QCXP7 and various users are reporting issues with this new release. TechPowerUp says common complaints include application freezes and instability.

Due to a bug in the new firmware, the 960 Pro SSD gets stuck at 100 percent utilization without outputting any data. Furthermore, there are also complaints about significant performance degradation:

Apparently, there's no hard-crashing involved as of yet, though the issue seems to be widespread enough that it's generating discussion in Samsung's forums, our own, and some other tech publication's. It seems the 960 Pro is getting stuck with 100% activity reports in the task manager with read and write speeds of 0. At the same time, some users are reporting performance degradation by sometimes up to 1,400 MB/s in read speeds when benchmarking the drives, which also doesn't bode well for the firmware's pedigree.

Samsung is investigating the matter, but notes that at the moment, the problem seems limited to a select number of users. Unfortunately, rolling back to a previous firmware version is not possible with the 960 Pro SSD.