A firmware is a program for the hardware to work effectively or properly. To update this SSD, I’m going to repost a Reddit Post from the PS5 forum ,

Updating Samsung 980 Pro Firmware (via PCIE)

This post if for people that are curious about updating the firmware on their Samsung 980 Pro NVME.

Background Info

The Samsung 980 Pro has been said to have a pretty bad failure rate and it seems to be firmware based. Once the drive goes bad, it's basically unrecoverable, so if you're still on the earlier firmware, it's recommended to update it as soon as possible. (EDIT: Newer models should be fine since they'll have newer firmware. Too bad there's no easy way to check it. Mine was purchased in Oct. 2021)

More info can be found here:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-980-pro-ssd-failures-firmware-update

The Problem for PS5 users

Unfortunately, we can't check the firmware on the PS5 and we can't upgrade directly from the PS5. So, the NVME has to be updated on a PC. I'm not going to pretend I know everything because my knowledge is fairly limited. I can, however give my experience.

What I Did

1. I took out my Drive and did NOT back it up. Probably not the smartest thing, but the PS5 said it would take over 5 hours to back it up. Not worth it.
2. Since I didn't have a spare M2 slot in my PC, I used a PCIE adapter to plug it in. I've heard it can't be done using a USB enclosure but I can't confirm. The adapter I used is this one:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TBW12B8?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

3) Once installed, my PC (Intel, Windows 11) didn't need to install any new software other than Samsung Magician. I put the adapter into a 3.0 slot instead of a 4.0 one. It mostly worked fine and Magician found the drive with no problem. Thankfully, I did NOT have to initialize or wipe the drive.

4) Using Magician, I updated the firmware. I was not able to check the drive health before the update nor after the update either. Magician said it was an unknown error. Maybe it was the adapter or the PCIE slot (or even the drive...). But since the firmware updated fine, I wasn't too worried.

5) I put the drive back in my PS5 and all of my games were still there. Noice.

Anyway, that's all. I don't mean for this to be an exhaustive tutorial. You follow it at your own risk. Use your best judgement when working on your stuff.

FYI, Magician is a Samsung software where you can find in their website. https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/support/tools/