WTF?! Louis Rossmann, the consumer-rights activist, independent technician, and owner of a very popular YouTube channel, says he will take Samsung to court over a broken 990 Pro SSD. He claims the company isn't honoring its warranty policy because the memory crisis has pushed the price up so much since the drive was purchased, making a replacement far more expensive than the original sale.
Update (June 16): Samsung contacted TechSpot to clarify that, in cases where a warranty replacement is unavailable, customers receive a refund based on the device's current market value, determined by its current sale price on Samsung.com. The company said this policy applies across its product portfolio and is communicated to customers once the refund process begins. Samsung added that it had communicated the same clarification to Rossmann, though he does not appear to have publicly confirmed receiving a revised refund offer as of publication.
Rossmann says he bought the Samsung 990 Pro 4TB from Best Buy less than two years ago for around $330. The drive was being used with a heatsink and two 80mm fans above it, and was part of a RAID 1 array.
According to Samsung's own warranty page, the 990 Pro 4TB is covered for five years or 2,400 TB written, whichever comes first. Rossmann says his drive failed well inside that period, repeatedly dropping out of the array and eventually becoming unusable.
The first response from Samsung Canada's business-to-business support desk appeared to agree with his diagnosis. The company said that when a drive remains visible to the operating system but stops responding to NVMe admin commands or SMART tools, it indicates a fatal controller or firmware-level lockup and requires a warranty replacement.
After being redirected to Samsung's US memory support team, Rossmann says he sent in the requested information, logs, receipt, and photos (eventually) before shipping the SSD to the company. Samsung later returned the drive with a repair statement saying it had passed testing and was "verified as good."
Rossmann says the returned SSD was anything but. In the video, he connects it to PC-3000 Express hardware used in his data recovery business and shows write speeds collapsing to around 40MB/s to 60MB/s before the drive stops behaving normally again.
Samsung later told him that the service center had reset the controller, reflashed the firmware, and completed a stress test that should replicate normal read and write operations in a standard consumer environment.
The company said it could reopen the warranty ticket, but added that because of a "very big shortage of memory products," it did not have his model or a comparable SSD available for replacement, apparently. So, a refund would be started instead.
The memory crisis has made warranty claims a lot less straightforward for consumers. A refund based on the original purchase price would not cover the cost of an equivalent drive today. He pointed out that the same 4TB 990 Pro is now selling for around $950, almost three times what he paid.
Rossmann says he has given Samsung 60 days' notice to provide a new or equivalent working 4TB 990 Pro. If not, he plans to file suit in Travis County, Texas.
A pinned comment under Rossmann's video notes that Samsung's own SSD warranty terms appear to address this exact situation. If the company cannot repair or replace a defective SSD, the policy says it can refund the "then current market value" of the product at the time the warranty claim is made. That clause likely works in Samsung's favor when products depreciate, but in this case, it could mean paying far more than Rossmann originally spent.
YouTuber says he will sue Samsung for dodging 990 Pro SSD warranty replacement amid memory crisis
