Puget drops Samsung 990 Pro SSDs due to reliability concerns

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,240   +192
Staff member
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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For once being cheap has paid off! I bought the WD Black SN850 back when I did my build and for my PS5 I bought an ADATA XPG, in both cases they were the cheapest 1TB gen4X4 drives that met the PS5 requirements. Samsung 980 Pro was near the most expensive at the time.
 
Intel Optane drive user here. Ill be dead before it ever thinks about failure. Tried and true tech. Too bad they cancelled it.
 
I have 980 Pro 1TB. How do we check Drive health with a percentage? I have Samsung Magician and it only shows Drive health as good with 20TB written.
 
Their update will not fix the drives

I can kill ANY Samsung SSD or thumb drive (on purpose) due to their incompetent firmware

In fact, I have several Samsung SSD's and thumb drives I killed during testing

Apparently, my home testing is far more thorough than Samsung's in house testing

There is no fix for Samsung drives!
 
I will stick with my crucial drives, the two samsungs I have have been just fine but I have over 14 crucial bx, mx, and p3 drives working in various systems, had one bx drive fail after a year and half, crucial replaced in about two weeks.
 
I will stick with my crucial drives, the two samsungs I have have been just fine but I have over 14 crucial bx, mx, and p3 drives working in various systems, had one bx drive fail after a year and half, crucial replaced in about two weeks.

I still use C300 which I bought in 2010. For many years I use it as temp/download folder.
 
I don’t know how it is in the world, but we have several large retail chains that officially publish statistics on failures, warranty cases for all goods.

So, even according to these statistics (which is clearly seen from the correlation of different manufacturers, but made in reality at the same factory and on the same conveyor - such as ADATA 8200 SSD vs HP 950EX - this is the same drive from ADATA inside), it is clear that 1 in 20 buyers of AData or HP SSDs experience warranty issues, while only 1 in 200 for Samsung SSD's buyers have problems. I think it's obvious...

The quality of testing of all SSDs, without exception, has plummeted since March 2020. Samsung began to have severe quality problems since the fall of 2020.

WD famously had an EPIC FAIL at the end of 2021 when they lost platters for 1 million 1TB SSDs at once. And it is not known where these plates went, not the fact that they were in the trash. It's entirely possible that WD management simply sold them to small second-tier manufacturers who turned them into cheap drives.

Luck ends where there is no input and output quality control. Where the management of the company and factories behave deliberately immoral, carrying out dirty optimizations in their pocket, including bribes and kickbacks from suppliers.
 
Don't buy Transcend flash and SSD - it's cheaters of NAND market. I have all it and test for years. It company always lies about write limit in TBW of SSD (overestimating it at least 5-6 times) and size of flash drive written on retail box.
 
There's incredibly ironic about this. Back when I worked for Tiger Direct, anything branded "Sabrent" was the cheapest item of its kind in our inventory. Look at them now! :laughing:
 
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