A few days ago Samsung has released new firmware for the 960 series SSDs. It's reported throughout the web that multiple end-users are seeing issues with application freezes or a sudden drop in performance.
From the looks of it involves firmware update 3B6QCXP7 and 3B7QCXE7, specifically for the 960 series NVMe M2 drives (both EVO and Pro). While we cannot see how big the user-base affected is, we simply wanted to put out the word as hey, better stay safe and do not upgrade to this firmware just yet.
Currently, we are seeing some reports here in the forums and multiple reports at the Samsung community forums, also widespread on the web more on technology forums users report the same or a similar story. While it does not seem to affect everybody who updates, you should be careful. For now, if the Samsung Magician is triggering you to update the firmware, just don't. If you already did and ran into an issue, some users have reported removing the NVME 2.3 driver software fixes the issue when going back to the standard Microsoft NVMe driver (which is slower). Alternatively, version 2.2 could/would work as well.
We'll update this item once more information is available. Please post your experiences, problems, and solves in this thread.