As of this writing on 4/4/25, the customer has yet to report another instance of the drives disappearing, making it over a month with no problems.
So it would seem that the problem was with compatibility between the two Samsung 990PRO SSDs and the motherboard on this Dell Precision 3680. Once the Samsungs were removed and the Western Digitals were installed, no further disappearing drive issues have occurred.
On Dec 30, 2024, I reconfigured the disks in this computer to comply with the official Dell storage matrix described above, in that the two Samsung SSDs are just regular storage and are not configured as any sort of RAID. So this computer has a WD 512GB SSD as the boot disk and 2 each Samsung 2TB SSDs as separate storage disks NOT set up in any sort of RAID config.
After operating normally for about two months, I was informed today by the customer that the computer once again played "hide the salami" with the shared storage drive. Will report to Dell Support.
Before contacting Dell Support I Googled up the Samsung 970 PRO SSDs and found that these disks have a history. When they first came out many people were reporting that their health stats as shown in the Samsung Magician app was unexpectedly and rapidly deteriorating, and that there was a firmware fix issued by Samsung that was purported to address the issue.
More recently, others have been posting about them doing a disappearing act, just like mine have. Some of the people have stated they sent the disks back to Samsung for RMA. I decided to kick the Samsungs to the curb and replace them with Western Digital Black SSDs of the same size. It's been more than two weeks since they were replaced and the customer has not yet reported a reoccurrence of the disappearing drive problem. It's still too early to declare victory....if the system can go an entire month with no drive issues, then I might consider the problem to be fixed. If it pans out this way, that means that Samsung 970 PRO SSDs might have some sort of compatibility issue with Dell's configuration of their Precision 3680 line.
DanInPhilly
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4 Posts
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April 4th, 2025 12:22
Here's another update.
As of this writing on 4/4/25, the customer has yet to report another instance of the drives disappearing, making it over a month with no problems.
So it would seem that the problem was with compatibility between the two Samsung 990PRO SSDs and the motherboard on this Dell Precision 3680. Once the Samsungs were removed and the Western Digitals were installed, no further disappearing drive issues have occurred.
DanInPhilly
1 Rookie
•
4 Posts
0
February 26th, 2025 22:50
Here's an update.
On Dec 30, 2024, I reconfigured the disks in this computer to comply with the official Dell storage matrix described above, in that the two Samsung SSDs are just regular storage and are not configured as any sort of RAID. So this computer has a WD 512GB SSD as the boot disk and 2 each Samsung 2TB SSDs as separate storage disks NOT set up in any sort of RAID config.
After operating normally for about two months, I was informed today by the customer that the computer once again played "hide the salami" with the shared storage drive. Will report to Dell Support.
DanInPhilly
1 Rookie
•
4 Posts
0
March 14th, 2025 16:18
Here's another update.
Before contacting Dell Support I Googled up the Samsung 970 PRO SSDs and found that these disks have a history. When they first came out many people were reporting that their health stats as shown in the Samsung Magician app was unexpectedly and rapidly deteriorating, and that there was a firmware fix issued by Samsung that was purported to address the issue.
More recently, others have been posting about them doing a disappearing act, just like mine have. Some of the people have stated they sent the disks back to Samsung for RMA. I decided to kick the Samsungs to the curb and replace them with Western Digital Black SSDs of the same size. It's been more than two weeks since they were replaced and the customer has not yet reported a reoccurrence of the disappearing drive problem. It's still too early to declare victory....if the system can go an entire month with no drive issues, then I might consider the problem to be fixed. If it pans out this way, that means that Samsung 970 PRO SSDs might have some sort of compatibility issue with Dell's configuration of their Precision 3680 line.
(edited)