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What just happened? Puget Systems has stopped offering Samsung’s 990 Pro solid-state drives in new builds following numerous reports of health degradation issues. Problems arose last year when the custom PC builder started seeing abnormally high failure rates in the field on the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB model. Puget worked with Samsung to help track down the culprit and just recently, the Korean tech giant issued a firmware update to remedy the matter.
Samsung’s newer 990 Pro, meanwhile, started exhibiting issues of its own shortly after launch. In our coverage late last month, we highlighted accounts of users on Reddit and elsewhere experiencing alarmingly low health numbers on their 990 Pros. In one instance, SSD utilities showed a user’s drive was already down to 93 percent health despite having only written about 7TB. Another user reported their drive being 36 percent worn out after writing less than 2TB of data.
Puget said Samsung is currently investigating 990 Pro reports but in the meantime, the system builder has decided to switch to an alternative product offering while the matter unfolds.
For 1TB and 2TB NVMe drives, Puget is now deploying SSDs from Sabrent. The company has been using 4TB and 8TB Sabrent drives for a while now and hasn’t had any issues with them. Their smallest option, a 500GB model, will remain the Samsung 980 Pro considering that size is not available in the 990 Pro line and thus, not wrapped up in the latest affair.
Puget’s William George said they don’t normally announce changes to their product line like this but felt it was necessary in this situation considering they have been so outspoken about Samsung SSD reliability in the past.
Customers running a system equipped with a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB have already been contacted about how to update their firmware, we’re told, and those with 990 Pro issues are encouraged to reach out so Puget can make things right.
Have you experienced any issues with either the 980 Pro or 990 Pro?
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