Why nobody talks about how much SSD firmware updates matter

I work at a repair shop in Phoenix and last month we had 3 customers come in with the same Samsung 870 Evo drives that were suddenly running slow as hell. Checked the drives and saw they hadn't been updated since 2021. Ran the firmware update tool and all 3 went back to normal speeds within 10 minutes. Anyone else noticing drives getting bogged down after a year or two because people never check for firmware updates?

3 comments

3 Comments

thomas_price22d ago

Hang on, I gotta push back on this a little. Sure, updates matter for some drives, but I've seen plenty of folks chase firmware updates for no reason when their real problem is the drive is just full or dying. Most people aren't running Samsung 870s in a repair shop, they're using whatever budget drive came in their laptop. I've got a pile of old SSDs at home that never got a single firmware update and they're still running fine years later. Feels like this is more of a Samsung issue than a general rule for everyone.

gavin_kim22d ago

Wait, is everyone just ignoring how all this firmware talk sounds exactly like that thing that happened with my buddy's car last month? He kept chasing down software updates for his entertainment system thinking it'd fix his car's weird shuddering, and it turned out the whole issue was just a loose belt in the engine. That's the thing with tech these days, everyone's so obsessed with keeping stuff "up to date" that they forget sometimes the hardware just needs a good clean or a simple replacement. I still remember my old laptop that blue screened every time I updated the SSD firmware, so I just stopped doing it and it worked fine for another two years before the whole thing fried anyway. Makes me wonder if half these firmware fixes are even tested properly before they get pushed out, or if companies just release them to look busy.

lewis.brian8d ago

Yo I actually read a thing from some storage engineer a few months back that explained this pretty well. Apparently a lot of SSD manufacturers push out firmware patches that fix stuff like write amplification bugs and garbage collection algorithms that get worse over time as the drive ages. The Samsung 870s especially had that issue where the controller would start being lazy about trimming dead cells and the firmware update basically re-teaches it how to do its job. So yeah Thomas is right that not every drive needs updates constantly but for certain models like the 870 and some Crucial MXs it can make a night and day difference. I'd still tell people to check maybe once a year if they're on a popular model just to be safe.