Earlier this week, Puget Systems said it worked with Samsung to determine what caused the 980 Pro SSD to fail in a customer’s computer. After months of discussion on web forums and on his Reddit, the Chinese man attributed the issue to an outdated firmware (3B2QGXA7) that shipped with early versions of his 980 Pro. New firmware 5B2QGXA7 seems to have fixed the issue.
That said, according to Puget, the successor to the 980 Pro, the Samsung 990 Pro, have their own problemsThe company is concerned about early reports of durability issues with the 990 Pro, despite delivering excellent performance and passing its certification process with flying colors.
As mentioned above, many users reported that their 990 Pro’s health dropped by an average of 1% per week. One user said SMART diagnostics wrote the drive he stuck at 6,641GB and within a month his health dropped by 7%. Another 990 Pro owner of his, in one month he reported a 12% drop in health. Perhaps the most alarming statistic comes from Neil Scofield. Post to Twitter After 2TB of data was written, his drive’s health dropped by 36%.
Puget has clearly seen enoughwrites, “These drives are popular and commonly used as both primary OS and application drives, as well as fast storage for project files. So the endurance (and thus longevity) of the drives is really If it’s slowing down at this rate, I’d be very concerned, and as a result the company will stop using most Samsung SSDs (although the 500GB version of the 980 Pro will still have them). It is unknown how long this change will last.
Puget already relies on Sabrent’s 4TB and 8TB SSDs for customer systems and will add 1TB and 2TB SKUs to replace the 980 Pro and 990 Pro. With more established brands like Crucial, Western Digital, and Kingston in the space, the move to Sabrent is interesting. However, Sabrent SSDs have a reputation for high performance and are consistently on our Best SSD list.
Puget added that he doesn’t often comment when switching brands of components in a computer. After all, most customers probably don’t care what kind of memory, power supply, or SSD they have installed, as long as their performance and reliability standards are met. However, “He has been very outspoken about Samsung SSD reliability in the past, so I felt it was important for him to speak out in this particular situation.”
Puget is clearly thinking about long-term reputation here, adding near the end of his post about Samsung and Sabrent’s decisions: For our customers. ”
