updating Dell version of Samsung pm830 firmware

After reading the 15 pages and a108239's post on this one, I'm inclined to believe that he's correct, is there anyone else who did some research into this matter?

I don't have a SATA3 motherboard to be able to do some benchmarks on these drives but I do have pretty much all the drives that have been discussed in this thread, with all available firmwares:

CXM02D1Q in a 128GB drive which I've updated to CXM03D1T - with the first firmware HDDSentinel was reporting that there's no TRIM support or it's deactivated, with the second one everything works pretty much great;
CXM02D1Q in a 256GB drive which I plan to update to either CXM03D1T or to CXM03B1Q using the "hacked" DSRD.enc - I'm still wondering about the benefits of this (the increased 4K writes) and if I'll be able to actually notice them in a SATA2 machine;
CXM74D1Q in a 256GB drive which I plan to update to CXM76D1Q as that seems to be the latest available firmware for that model.

I believe this is a really interesting thread and with more work from the skilled users we'd be able to convert our drives into full-fredged retail drives. Perhaps we could set up a donation account to speed up the development in this?

 

It's slow coming it out hibernation or is lacking trim for some drives?

HP I think has a wonderful utility to make your usb drive bootable. I forget what it's called.

 

Strangely enough, the HP USB Key Utility is called exactly what it does... you have to provide your own DOS files.

I prefer using UNetbootin and it comes with FreeDOS for making a bootable USB stick. UNetbootin - Homepage and Downloads

I use UNetbootin with its integrated FreeDOS support for DOS-bootable GPU firmware flashing.

 

Here's a nice tutorial on how to create a bootable USB key:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...sh-aw-bios-updates-under-dos.html#post7076619

 

It was not only a few days, but I can be sure, that it solved my problem

 

why aren't people using the dell utility?

Samsung PM830 256GB FDE 7MM Firmware Update Driver Details | Dell US

 

I recently purchased a used PM830 FDE 2.5" 7mm 256GB (MZ-7PC256D) for 57$. It happened to be a OEM part with F/W CXM74D1Q (presumably DELL from Mid 2012). So my F/W is totally different from the version being discussed here and also failed to patch with CXM03B1Q even after multiple attempts. Finally came across F/W CXM76D1Q from Dell itself.
Applied the patch and it worked fine for me. NO Data Wipe and all data and Win7 was intact.




@steviejones133 @phrike

 

Still sucks donkey dong that we can't use Magician on the PM830 because it is "OEM branded". Added to a list of reasons why I will never buy a samsung drive. I have an HP branded M600 256GB drive that works FINE with crucial's software.

 

My OEM drive (PM 830) is a FDE/SED self encrypting drive which is why the firmware is different from retail ones.
I modified the DSRD.enc to accept my F/W (CXM74D1Q →CXM76D1Q) during upgrade to retail CXM03B1Q but fails during the F/W download to device.
Also I noticed that the firmware file CXM03B1Q is 512 kB in size while the custom Dell F/W for SED is 656 kB.

Error downloading the MAIN Firmware ! : CXM03B1Q.bin

 

Checkout this cool Online tool from ZIBRI . A big thanks to him.
Online Samsung SSD firmware encoder/decoder!

 

any step by step on how to use that app ?

what file do we upload ? and where we put it back

Works from CXM03 D1Q?

 

Just upgraded my PM830 512GB CXM03D1 Q version to the CXM03D1 T version.
Worked flawlessly. I haven't benched before or after as I did it to hopefully never see that Watchdog BSOD again.
Just reporting it works just fine for the above mentioned SSD. Carry on

 

Is there anyone that has a copy of the CXM03D1 T firmware still available? I desperately would like to try it as I have a CXM03D1 Q drive that became incredibly slow. Now what's strange about it is I also had another D1Q drive that did the same thing, but I was able to get it back to full speed. This one just won't come back.

Symptoms: Very slow access time - 9 ms avg, compared to usual 0.1 when it is working properly through SSD-Z. This results in 1 MB/s random reads and writes (4K), but I can still get 100-150 MB/s sequential speed. Due to the slow random speed, the drive is nearly useless.

I believe I have the exact problem that D1Q was released to fix, but Dell only released it to people reporting the problem during the warranty period. It was shared here, but multiupload.nl has been dead for a year.

Please if anyone has CXM03D1 T available, upload it to mega, share on google drive, etc and then post the link.

 

I found this link somewhere in this thread and it still works.
However I was unable to flash my PM830. The process starts but results in an error. Tried three times.
Hope you have better luck!
https://doc-10-60-docs.googleuserco...9599577163758099/0B4HvIGs5gZaTdkkxallnVWgtVHM

 

I'm getting access denied on that link. Tried another browser and it had me sign in using Google credentials and says
HTTP 403 error
Microsoft Edge can’t get to this page


Can you upload the file you downloaded anywhere else for me?

 

Ok, I'll try with Dropbox:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ps634rwnyoxd5g/CXM03D1T_ZPE.EXE?dl=0

 

Thank you so much for the firmware. It did install but the bad news for me is it didn't fix the slowdown bug that is present on my SSD. It still has a 9.2 millisecond average response time compared to 0.133 ms on an identical working Samsung drive.

I will tell you this regarding the fact that you said your upgrade results in an error. The upgrade file of yours ONLY upgrades the drive if it is currently running firmware CXM03D1Q (You can decode DSRD.enc file to see this). Any other current firmware and it will fail. So if you are running some other firmware you will need to upgrade to CXM03D1Q first. I can't even find that firmware posted anywhere and both of my drives were already running 03D1Q when I got them used.


Successful upgrade:



Powered off and booted Windows. SSD-Z still shows EXTREMELY slow random access and transfer times.





Look at the IOPS for the first 3 results. See the average response time going down greatly? And with enough queue depth, the drive responds almost as fast as a normal one.

That is how I know it's some kind of SSD bug because the SSD's CPU is locked up in some kind of idle loop. If you throw enough requests at it, it stops doing whatever background task is seizing it up and devotes itself to responding to SATA requests. It acts almost normal for that brief length of time.


For reference, here is an identical PM830 in another computer of mine:






IOPS of 11,078 for random read with queue depth of 1. That's 100 times faster than the screwed up drive.

Now the strangest thing is that the "working" drive did the same thing a while back, slowed to 9 ms access time, but then it went back to normal after I attempted to flash a hacked firmware (03B1Q) and it failed . It has been normal ever since. The failed drive has been slow for 2 months now and no matter what I have done it remains slow.

 

UPDATE : 5 MONTHS LATER

The screwed up PM830 finally fixed itself. For anyone else, the solution seemed to be this:

1) Installed PM830 in secondary bay of a laptop and formatted NTFS
2) Ran 3 separate instances of H2testw, each one using different destination folder on SSD. First one, 4096 MB endless verify. Second, 4096 MB endless verify. Third, select all available space, endless verify. Ran all three simultaneously for about 4 hours.
3) Stopped all instances and left laptop powered on (never sleep), but nothing was using that drive for 7 days.
4) Decided to check drive again using SSD-Z and found full performance restored. The drive now has the same 78k IOPS @ ~308 MB/s performance as the working one.

I'll never buy a re-branded SSD again (i.e. Dell version of Samsung PM830 like this one).

 

So, can someone make proper instructions either for flashing to B1Q or D1T... (like what files to use, I can use Rufus to make a DOS bootable with Freedos, but after that, dsrdgui0/dsrd241/dsrd1_0 dont work... dsrd241 will show one of the drives when I hit Y the second time it flash's to fast but says something about not seeing the firmware folder/file...)

I am having no luck at all!

3 drives with mixed CXM02D1Q and CXM03D1Q firmware, cannot seem to get either firmware to update to B1Q or D1T...

Tried with the dell installer, tried with the ISO installer, tried with the installer from Samsung Magician 4.8 (attempting to get the one from 3.2, but no systems below win 10), no joy...

 

I'll try to help.

First tip : It would be good to get the 2D1Q drive(s) OFF DELL FIRMWARE and on to 03B1Q. Here is the download link for the file I have : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fKSpcBuJySOFWAxdj8RvDrPxye9h4lLH/view?usp=sharing

This is supposed to work on 2D1Q and 1D1Q firmware drives although I never was able to use it because mine were at 3D1Q. If this doesn't work for you, then the only thing you can do is go to 3D1Q IF you can find that firmware update somewhere.

Second is that you'll have to go from 3D1Q to 3D1T using that dropbox link several posts above. You cannot go to Samsung retail firmware from 3D1Q (that I have found and I spent a LOT of time on it)

It's important you extract with directories so that it looks like the following. This is from the 3D1T zip.

If you still need this file, I have it. It looks like the dropbox link above still works though.

Code:

 Directory of L:\

04/02/2012  03:50 PM    <DIR>          .
04/02/2012  03:50 PM    <DIR>          ..
04/02/2012  01:19 PM               117 DSRD.enc
07/27/2011  11:42 PM           478,448 DSRD241.EXE
04/02/2012  03:50 PM    <DIR>          FW
09/20/2010  12:57 PM            17,028 int_ahci.drv
09/20/2010  12:57 PM            15,576 int_ich.drv
               4 File(s)        511,169 bytes

 Directory of L:\FW

04/02/2012  03:50 PM    <DIR>          .
04/02/2012  03:50 PM    <DIR>          ..
04/02/2012  03:50 PM    <DIR>          CXM03D1T
               0 File(s)              0 bytes

 Directory of L:\FW\CXM03D1T

04/02/2012  03:50 PM    <DIR>          .
04/02/2012  03:50 PM    <DIR>          ..
04/02/2012  01:19 PM           524,288 MCXNF.enc
               1 File(s)        524,288 bytes

     Total Files Listed:
               5 File(s)      1,035,457 bytes

I used these updates on a USB bootable flash drive formatted with DOS startup.

 

Sweet sauce, first try from 02D1Q to 03B1Q for the 2 that where on it! with your file! (looking at structure, looks like it was the bloody .enc in the FW folder as well...)

I will have to read the forum again to see if its worth it to jump from 03D1Q to 03D1T, would be wonderful if i could get 03D1Q to 03B1Q, but if you have had no joy, I strongly doubt I would

Thanks again!

EDIT: bleh, you know if 03D1T has temp? I noticed flashing 03B1Q it now has Temp, where before on 02D1Q and 03D1Q dont...

 

No problem. If you want to experiment as I did, you will find this tool useful: http://www.zibri.org/2015/05/online-samsung-ssd-firmware_6.html

It's a online encoder/decoder that will take the .ENC files and decode them. For example, the DSRD.enc file after decoding is a clear text file describing the new firmware parameters:

Code:

<SSD>
<SN>ALL</SN>
<MOD>ALL</MOD>
<CURFW>CXM03D1Q</CURFW>
<NEWFW>CXM03D1T</NEWFW>
<IFW>MCXNF.bin</IFW>
</SSD>

You can edit it and put it through that same tool again and it re-encodes it. This is what I tried to get the 03B1Q to upgrade from 03D1Q but it does not work. The firmware upgrade fails and you are left at the original firmware.

Good luck.