Samsung: Firmware Update for the 990 Pro SSD Is On the Way

One advantage of Samsung ssd is that the entire package from the controller to the nand is done in house. This helps speed things up when there is an issue that requires a firmware update.

 

Will be going WD Black on my next PC to stay on the safer side.

 

I don't think the problem affects everyone : 3 Tb written on my 990 Pro 2 Tb in two months and still 100% Health.
perhaps a bad serie on first batch ?

 

just bought 2tb for half the price

 

I bought a new PC in December 2022 with a 2 TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus and 2 TB Samsung 980 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD plus I picked up an additional two 2 TB Seagate FireCuda SSDs for £150 each from Amazon to fill up all the NVMe slots on my motherboard for future games storage. Both Samsung SSDs have been updated to the latest firmware. Samsung Magician is showing Good for both the Samsung drives but CrystalDiskInfo seems to have an odd bug as the power on count doesn't seem to be updating for the 980, only the hours used (I think, I will have to double-check). Both are still showing 100% though.

I must admit that I was initially a bit concerned after reading about the issues with the newer 990 SSD and also reports that this issue has been discovered in the 980 and 970 as well but I am unsure how true that is or if that was just scaremongering by specific websites or YouTubers. Personally, I have been using Samsung SSDs for years and had a 1 TB Samsung 850 EVO in my previous PC that I used for Windows 10 for 3 or 4 years with no issues.

I do recall my first boot SSD though... a Crucial 128 GB model that went from 100% to 0% in a year despite only having Windows 8.1 installed on it. This was the reason that was replaced with a Samsung drive and they would always be my go-to for SSDs going forward. I hope this issue can be rectified quickly for the 990 before it does any damage to their reputation.

 

It's rather annoying when manufacturers deny there's anything wrong, when there obviously is something wrong. East Asian companies have the additional cultural background of fearing losing face, but it's not like Western companies would be gleefully running forward, admitting their mistakes, either.

 

Mine 1TB 990 Pro shows 96% after 2.5 TB of writes. OS installed on it. So i would benefit from the Firmware update. Hopefully it fixes further degradation.

 

That's a big loss! Hopefully 96 %will be enough for the computers lifetime and the next one!else you would be looking at 62.5 tbw lifespan witch is abysmal

 

mine 93% after 2,4TB, Win11 OS Drive, btw with the latest magician (7.2.1) there was a nice bsod upgrading firmware! Probably not correct disk unmount procedure...

 

It's really gruesome to hear numbers like that! My 1TB 980 Pro (OS drive) is still at 100% after 4.4TB of writes. I'm happy it wasn't affected by the bug, even though I only updated the firmware a week or two ago. My old firmware was the version susceptible to the bug. At least Magician updated the firmware perfectly smoothly.

 

This is why I buy stuff like this that has been out 6 months to a year. I love buying stuff with all the kinks out. I'll probably get a 990 pro at the end of this year as I am still on AM4.

 

My 4 SSDs in my desktop are like this. They were all updated to the latest firmware when received.

Model | Remaining Life | Total Hosts Writes | Total Hosts Reads
Samsung 850 EVO 1TB | 98% | 18725 GB |
Samsung 850 EVO 120GB | 97% | 4120 GB |
OCZ Vertex 4 120GB | 96% | 15462 GB |
Crucial P1 512GB | 85% | 37732 GB (Write) | 48006GB (Read)

 

My 990Pro is at 100% and I have about 1.2TB written. Pretty new drive.

The 980Pro I've had since day 1 is also at 100% with over 10TB written.

I'd say there are only a select few with issues for the most part.

 

For those of you have written 2.5TB's and are already at 96% that is terrible.

My Corsair MP600 Gen 1 which I picked up in Dec 2019.

Drive Lifetime: 96%
Lifetime Writes: 38.21 TB
Total Power-On Time : 1009 Days or 33 months or 2.7 Years

 

So, if I can be allowed an uninformed guess, if the smart values aren't getting reset, then it's possible that the drives were experiencing a malfunction, and actually writing tons of extraneous data, possibly by way of write amplification, and maybe also the ram cache erroneously not getting used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification

 

I use my SSDs mostly for cold storage of games, and I have one 480 GB Mushkin I bought from Newegg back in May 2015 that is supposedly still at 99% health. MLC, but without 3D stacking. Uses a Phison controller, which I researched a lot as it wasn't that well known back then. Now they are a highly regarded outfit, afaik. Payed what would be an absurd amount of money by today's standards, $189.99 and $179.99 (I ended up buying a second one), but I don't regret it. The second one is at 95% health, but it got more of a workout over the years. Today's TLC drives can also have incredibly long life spans, but afaik the firmware/hardware needs to be more elaborate to ensure that, versus what MLC firmware/hardware is required to do. I have three other SSDs, one with MLC, and two with TLC, and I'm pretty sure that one of the TLCs, made by Crucial, is wearing out at a bit faster rate than my MLC ones. But I installed it in December 2018, and it's still at 95% health.

So I'm OK with using TLC, though if I was going to use a SSD as a beater drive, I'd think of tracking down a MLC one. I have an older MLC based MyDigitalSSD BPX NVMe drive, just 480 GB, that I formatted so I could use most of it as a "read cache" for my games that are on a spinning drive. That's in addition to a ram cache of those games. I use PrimoCache, which is a topic unto itself, which could be considered a more elaborate version of what Samsung offers. TL;DR version, PrimoCache stores what gets read by the system when playing games, and keeps it in a portion of your system memory that it allocates to itself, and which it reloads automatically after a reboot. If you offer it a SSD, or a SSD partition, that it can take over, then it can store those reads to that as well.

So I get to store about 16 GBs of game data into ram, and I have another 91.89 GB of SSD space that gets used to cache game data. So the second time I load up a game/game level, it gets read from ram or the SSD. Pretty neat trick, imo. Anyway, that old NVMe drive installed in March of 2017 is still at 98% health. At one time, in an older build, it was my C: drive.

Gotta be honest though, because on one hand the sizes of SSDs, Hard Drives, and ram modules, that are getting offered these days are providing gamers with a "post scarcity" environment. Though on the other hand you can usually find a reason to want more and better usability from your storage, so clever solutions will likely, imo, remain popular.

I have 64 GB of DDR4 ram, about half getting utilized by PrimoCache (it also caches reads from my C: Drive, which only has Windows on it, and prefetches it), and it fills all four slots on my mobo, and lots of spinning drives, albeit they are starting to look not too large compared to what is now getting offered. I'm tempted to buy one more HD, but it would be nice to wait on that until I buy a new system based on DDR5, and a second or third generation of AMD processors designed to use that.

 

Uh, after reading so much stuff related to firmware issues of Samsung drives, and my brother basically killing one of his own drives with a simple firmware update last week (it turned the device into read only and Samsung just told him they can't reverse it anymore), I think I'll make a big turn from now on whenever I see that brand.

 

I just did this last weekend. I own (2) 2Tb 980 Pro's, purchased January of 2021. One was use as my main drive, and the other as a clone backup (cloned every 2-3months via USB case). Did a full diagnostics on both last weekend. The drive in the PC has 2 bad blocks, over 2000 media, and integrity errors. While the backup is still good. Both have the updated firmware. Samsung just gave me the green light to sent back the bad drive today. I took the back up, and will use it as a main drive in my backup PC until it fails, since it was purchase 2 weeks later then the other one. I have a Sabrent Rocket 2Tb purchased back in 2019, and not a issue.

 

Doesn't apply to me, but what about people using this drive in their PS5, how would one upgrade the firmware without a PC?