What just happened? Puget Systems has stopped offering Samsung 990 Pro solid-state drives in new builds after numerous reports of performance problems. Problems arose last year when the collector of non-standard PCs began to observe an abnormally high level of failures in the field on the Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB model. Puget worked with Samsung to help find the culprit, and more recently, the Korean tech giant released a firmware update to fix the situation.
Meanwhile, the new Samsung 990 Pro started showing its own problems shortly after launch. In our review at the end of last month, we highlighted user accounts on Reddit and elsewhere that have alarmingly low health scores on their 990 Pro. In one case, SSD utilities showed that the user’s disk status had already dropped to 93 percent, despite the fact that he had recorded only about 7 TB. Another user reported that his disk was worn out by 36 percent after writing less than 2 TB of data.
Puget said Samsung is currently investigating reports about the 990 Pro, but in the meantime the system builder has decided to switch to an alternative product offering while the case unfolds.
For NVMe drives with a capacity of 1 TB and 2 TB, Puget now uses solid-state drives from Sabrent. The company has been using 4TB and 8TB Sabrent disks for some time now, and there have been no problems with them. Their smallest variant, the 500 GB model, will remain the Samsung 980 Pro, given that this size is not available in the 990 Pro line and, therefore, is not related to recent events.
William George of Puget said that they don’t usually announce changes to their product line, but felt it was necessary in this situation, given that in the past they have been so outspoken about the reliability of Samsung solid-state drives.
We were informed that customers using a system equipped with Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB have already been contacted about how to update their firmware, and those who have problems with the 990 Pro are advised to contact Puget so that he can fix everything.
Have you had any problems with the 980 Pro or 990 Pro?
