At the end of January, we reported on the inconvenience faced by new Samsung 990 Pro SSD owners. Various disk diagnostic tools have indicated a drop in “health” detected through SMART technology of up to tens of percent within a few weeks.
To the problem pointed out the editor of NeoWin magazine Robbie Khan and almost immediately other users who were unpleasantly surprised by the results of the test tools started to speak up. In one case, for example, CrystalDiskInfo software declared only 64% disk “health” after writing only two terabytes of data.
Firmware update
On Monday, February 13, Samsung released a firmware update for the 990 Pro drives. Although no official release notes have been provided by the manufacturer, Tom’s Hardware reportsthat the update is likely intended to fix an issue that was causing drives to report wear at a faster than expected rate.
The downside of the firmware update (version number 1B2QJXD7) is the fact that does not reset wear percentage counter. So if you have a drive that reports “health” at 72%, then a firmware fix will prevent that number from continuing to grow faster than it should, but it won’t make the counter go back up.
This may be due to the fact that an unspecified bug could actually be causing accelerated disk degradationor by the drive simply not being able to distinguish between real wear from normal use and artificial “wear” from a firmware bug.
Go ahead and install
If you have a Samsung 990 Pro that is reporting unusually high wear and tear, it’s possible that another firmware update released sometime in the future will fix this problem. According to of Ars Technica magazine but it’s no use trying to contact Samsung customer support and try to get the drive repaired or replaced under warranty.
For most Windows users, the easiest way is installing a firmware update using Samsung Magician software. For Linux or other operating system users and for those who for some reason do not want to install the Magician software, the manufacturer offers ISO images that can be used to create bootable USB installation disks.
The previous generation Samsung 980 PRO also received a firmware update in January due to an unrelated reliability issue. The American company Puget Systems, which specializes in the production and sale of high-quality desktop and workstations, responded to the problems by announcing that it will use SSDs from other manufacturers in its computers from now on.
