Samsung 990 PRO Set To Get Firmware Update As Lifespan Issues Looms
Samsung 990 PRO Set To Get Firmware Update As Lifespan Issues Looms
The mysterious glitch that cause the drives to “wear out” at high rate despite very little drive writes may see a fix soon.
Previously, reports of Samsung’s latest SSD, the 990 PRO started to surface with the common issue being rapidly deteriorating drive health despite very little drive writes made into the drive. One user, Neil Schofield reported his drive has only 64% health remaining despite written only 2TB worth of data (typical modern TLC SSDs can have endurance rating exceeding 1,000TB written, for reference).
After reading your article, I thought I'd take a look at mine. The results are horrendous! 36% worn out after writing less than 2TB of data? @SamsungUK what is going on? pic.twitter.com/VdzLoEAarN
— Neil Schofield (@neilaschofield) January 22, 2023
Samsung is aware of the issue – in a German-language Samsung discussion post, moderator DavidB stated “Samsung is currently reviewing customer anomaly inquiries related to the SMART Percentage Used (on Samsung Magician) and/or Health Status (on Crystal Disk Info) of the Samsung SSD 990 PRO.” The company’s technicians managed to replicate the glitch on certain conditions, according to the moderator. A fix is on the way, with the moderator expecting the update to release somewhere later this month.
To recap, the aforementioned case wasn’t the only one that was seen with drive health issues. Another high-profile case comes from Neowin editor Robbie Khan, with his 2TB 990 PRO dropping to 94% within few days of use. The RMA came unfruitful, with the company unable to find issues and was thus returned back to him with the drive reformatted.
To make things worse, Puget Systems – builder of professional workstations, has temporarily halted the use of Samsung 980 PROs and 990 PROs (respectively affected by Read-Only firmware bug and the aforementioned drive health issue) and has been using equivalent Sabrent drives in its place. Puget stated that they came with this decision “while this situation unfolds and we learn more.”
As its systems have used Samsung SSDs for a long time, Puget also clarified: “we don’t often announce changes to our product line like this, as brands and models shift all the time, but because we have been so outspoken about Samsung SSD reliability in the past, we felt that it was important to speak up in this particular situation.” That being said, Samsung SSDs will continue to be used for 500GB-specced systems.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
Pokdepinion: It’s been a bad year for Samsung’s SSD division so far, isn’t it?
