Samsung Targets Gamers With 3 Extremely Fast 990 Pro NVMe SSDs

rumple9 said:
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/d...as-pcie-5-ssdspcie-4-ssds-almost-similar.html
Click to expand...

As mentioned in the direct storage thread, the reason Gen 4 and 5 drives show no performance advantage in that game is because it uses ds1.0 instead of 1.1, that means game assets must be decompressed by the CPU and with DS1.0 your game load times become almost entirely dependent on your CPU - if you have a 6 core CPU the game takes much longer to load than if you have 24 cores
 
Last edited:
mrk said:
Microcenter have pulled their shelf stock of the 990 Pro as reported by a user on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/10r8qz4/samsung_990pro_pulled_off_shelves_at_microcenter/

Also Samsung have issued a critical firmware for the 980 Pro to prevent an issue where the 980 Pro was failing and going into read only mode. The FW update stops that happening, but will not reverse a read only drive. No news on what's going on still with the 990 Pro drives though.

Edit, just checked my 970 Evo Plus and all checks out :cool:

6Rmzvwg.png
Click to expand...



That Reddit post confused me, cause I went to checked the microcentre website and they are still selling the 990 pro so why would they remove them from shelves but continue selling online especially when for retail stores like this, their online sales will be their primary sales method.

That firmware issue seems to affect drives that used the Elpis controller but I checked and the 990 Pro doesn't use the same controller so it's confusing if it's the same firmware bug or a different one. The 990 Pro uses the Pascal controller, an 8nm controller meant to replace Elpis
 
Last edited:
Yeah there are two issues at hand here, the developing one with the 990 Pro. and the ongoing one that has been talked about for months with the 980 Pro. It looks like Samsung have finally released a firmware for the 980 Pro, and now the 990 Pro issue remains. Will that also take months to fix? At the rate some 990s are dropping health, they will be at 0% by the time a firmware is out!

I suspect an RMA is going to be needed anyway as no firmware will restore the health remaining stats anyway and at this point, would skew the actual numbers since all these affected drives have multiple TBs written to them anyway.
 
Last edited:
My own feelings are now that Samsung have released an update for the 980 Pro, they know what the issue is and how to fix it. So I think they'll be doing some more testing on the 990 Pro version, before releasing it in another week or so.
 
Last edited:
Could someone link me the symptoms or how to check if mine are affected please? I have two 2tb 990’s.
 
mrk said:
Just open CrystalDiskInfo or Samsung Magician and check the SMART attribute for health percentage remaining or used if using Magician. All screenshots for this have been posted above in the thread.
Click to expand...
I’ll check when back home. Just read through this thread and that’s poor customer service. I would expect them to put it down to a bug (it’s not reading correctly) so the percentage means nothing. Still it’s all part of the product so it should work as intended.
 
Both of my 990’s are at 100%. I’ve only written 4.8tb on one and 1.5tb on the other though. I’ll be keeping an eye on this. I wonder if anyone has had this happen with lighter use?
 
God damn it that's my 2nd 990 replacement because the write speed is inconsistent, not only the 2nd one isn't performing any better but there you go after 1 month:


7cbea8074656784c1645f085660a8ce2.png
 
Yeah think for me that's Samsung NVMe drives out of the picture in future now. Gonna stick to WD/Sabrent etc. The 8TB SATA will remain as that's rather good and has been fine.

Shame really, I always prefer sticking to the same brands for category items, storage being Samsung, no need to install another piece of software etc then.

Ah well.
 
Last edited:
I bought 2 2TB 980 pros on 6 November, they are still in thier packaging, as waiting to build a pc with them ! they where going to be my main to drives, for o/s and games, their serial numbers dont seem to be the ones mention here,

nascompares.com

Samsung SSDs Dying! 980 Pro, 990, 970 EVO PLUS, PM9A1 and More Reporting Failures - Everything We Know So Far!

Samsung SSD Failure Reports Increasing - What is happening? Note, Feb 15/02/23 - There is Updated Information on the Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD Firmware Issue. You can find out more in the article and video below: Samsung 990 Pro SSD Firmware Failures UPDATED Video - HERE Samsung 990 Pro SSD Failures U
nascompares.com nascompares.com

not sure if thats a definitive list, i guess the only thing i can do is use my 4TB ssd to initially install windows and then flash the firmware of the 2 980 pro's then reisntall on one of them !

or can you flash them from the bios ?
 
One reddit user in the below thread is saying their 980 pro went into read only mode one day after updating to the latest firmware.

Probably does not mean that the new firmware is also broken but more likely that his drive was gonna break anyway due to previous damage and the new firmware cannot reverse damage to blocks on the drive

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
 
Last edited:
Most people will be unaware. Not everyone is going to delve any further than “good” on the main page in Samsung Magician for example.
 
That's very true, Magician doesn't audibly notify you like Crystal Disk info does, and only those that know of third party tools will be using CDI anyway. The average user will install Magician, see "Good" and think everything is fine!
 
Puget Systems has announced it will stop using Samsung drives going forward for almost all its systems and will switch to Sabrent

www.pugetsystems.com

Update on Samsung SSD Reliability

We have been very public about how reliable Samsung SSDs have been in the past, so we wanted to explain why we are now moving part of our line to Sabrent.
www.pugetsystems.com www.pugetsystems.com
 
Last edited:
  • Wow
Reactions: mrk
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom