Samsung Targets Gamers With 3 Extremely Fast 990 Pro NVMe SSDs

I had to rma 2x 980 Pro due to speeds dropping off a cliff. If I remember right, it was due to the ssd cache being filled, and the drive then not being able to clear it, meaning the loss of the speed boost from using cache. They released a firmware to fix it, but all it did for me was give me full speeds for a few weeks until the cache was filled again. Secure erase was also a method that would bring it back up to speed.
Depending on use case, as this drop in performance could take a good few weeks to happen, I'm convinced there's a lot of 980 drives in the wild with the issue that the end users are unaware of. My 3rd drive seems ok, but that experience + these 990 stories, ill wait and see what happens over the next few months with the gen 5 scene.
 
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mrk said:
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!
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What were your speeds like? Were you having issues in that area also?
 
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mrk said:
Speeds were fine at all times for me. See earlier posts of benchmark scores but they were essentially 7100MB/s+ read and 6700+ write.
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Hopefully someone will hammer one that’s showing the issue to prove it is actually degradation rather than the percentage just being reported falsely in software.
 
The longer this goes on unresolved, the longer it will be for Samsung to recover their reputation from this. Either this gets fixed very soon, or their next drive has to be the best of the best.
 
I think every major tech site or youtuber has covered this now, you'd have thought Samsung would have made a statement update by now so since they have not, the situation can ohly be quite serious. if it was just a reporting error then a quick firmware rollout would have been pushed to Magician.
 
mrk said:
I think every major tech site or youtuber has covered this now, you'd have thought Samsung would have made a statement update by now so since they have not, the situation can ohly be quite serious. if it was just a reporting error then a quick firmware rollout would have been pushed to Magician.
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samsungs statement was that drives now come with 3 year warranty instead of 5
 
As someone who worked in multinational company ( Big 3 telecom companies) I can guarantee you that pushing firmware updates is not as simple as it looks... the whole process from R&D to testing a verification takes more than 2 weeks if you're fully dedicated assuming that you already know what's up, which probably isn't the case with Samsung....

If you think of it, it's not only the 990 PRO but also the generation older which raises a big question... Is there an architectural flaw in their design? Mind you but Samsung was caught a decade ago cheating by installing an OC deamon on their Galaxy phones to give you a better Antutu score against competition...

It looks like Samsung's main practice is numbers on paper which is enough to sell based on " biased " and manipulated reviews; in the end, the average joe will be quite happy paying premium for a " PRO " product but the pro will dig deeper to understand what he paid... Are we the absolute minority? unfortunately yes we are...
 
mrk said:
I think every major tech site or youtuber has covered this now, you'd have thought Samsung would have made a statement update by now so since they have not, the situation can ohly be quite serious. if it was just a reporting error then a quick firmware rollout would have been pushed to Magician.
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It might take a bit more time. However by then someone else will hopefully do some testing to shine some light on the situation. Although mine are fine it’s certainly going to make me take this into account when upgrading.
 
Sc00p007 said:
I had to rma 2x 980 Pro due to speeds dropping off a cliff. If I remember right, it was due to the ssd cache being filled, and the drive then not being able to clear it, meaning the loss of the speed boost from using cache. They released a firmware to fix it, but all it did for me was give me full speeds for a few weeks until the cache was filled again. Secure erase was also a method that would bring it back up to speed.
Depending on use case, as this drop in performance could take a good few weeks to happen, I'm convinced there's a lot of 980 drives in the wild with the issue that the end users are unaware of. My 3rd drive seems ok, but that experience + these 990 stories, ill wait and see what happens over the next few months with the gen 5 scene.
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This sounds very similar to an issue I had back in the day which I belive it was the 860 evo or 840 evo - it was a sata ssd and while the drive was at first fast after a few weeks of use the drive would slow to a crawl until Samsung released a firmware and the firmware made the drive fast again and then it became slow after another few weeks again.. eventually they released a firmware that was a permanent fix but it had a side effect, the fix worked by constantly re-writing over a certain part of the drive and it would keep the drive fast but this lowered it's life expectancy
 
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StephenJ said:
The damage has started Puget systems have switched to Sabrent
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Wow
I've not yet had a samsung fail but I have had 3 Sabrents die. Which put me off so I replaced them with Samsungs. And took the other Sabrents out too

What settings should i use in Magician to check speeds
I have 2 980 Pro's in my gaming rig

Using the std settings
The OS 980
6943 MB/s Read
2851 MB/s Write

Games 980
6975 MB/s Read
5165 MB/s Write
 
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mattyg said:
Wow
I've not yet had a samsung fail but I have had 3 Sabrents die. Which put me off so I replaced them with Samsungs. And took the other Sabrents out too

What settings should i use in Magician to check speeds
I have 2 980 Pro's in my gaming rig

Using the std settings
The OS 980
6943 MB/s Read
2851 MB/s Write

Games 980
6975 MB/s Read
5165 MB/s Write
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My experience with the drops in speed on 2x 980s, looked like your OS drive. It was the write speed that was mainly affected. I know half speed writes aren't a problem for me 99% of the time, but its not what i paid for, but at the end of the day not the end of the world
 
Sc00p007 said:
My experience with the drops in speed on 2x 980s, looked like your OS drive. It was the write speed that was mainly affected. I know half speed writes aren't a problem for me 99% of the time, but its not what i paid for, but at the end of the day not the end of the world
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I've got a 2tb 980 Pro to replace that one... Its a 1tb and is getting full'ish
I've had some slow down issues. And it takes about 1 min when booting into windows for it to settle down. Mouse slow etc. I assumed it was because its an old OS install. From before I upgraded
 
Something that can limit speed is Nvme slot you use, not likely to be cause of just having slow writes but something I ran into recently

I replaced my 990 pro with an sn850x and when I did this instead of putting the sn850x back into the gen5x4 slot I put it into a gen4x4. That should still be perfectly fine but I found both my sequential read and writes were capped at 6300 MB/s.

At first I thought ok maybe that's normal forbthe drive and it wasn't until techpowerup released a review of my motherboard a few days ago that I figured out Asus did some weird things with lane management on this board and the review was showing the same 6300mbps cap on the slot I was using and it showed the other gen4x4 slot had a cap of 6000 MB/s and the only Nvme slots that can do full gen4 speed is the two gen5x4 slots so I moved the drive


The cause of all of this seems to be because AMD's x670 chipsets cannot handle a Gen 5 SSD and a Gen 5 GPU and Thunderbolt 4 all at the same time and that's why AMD gave the boards two chipsets but even then it's complicated and can't deliver full bandwidth to everything at once, so Asus and likely others have had to be very creative with how they manage bandwidth around the board and in my case they choose to limit how much bandwidth the gen4 Nvme slots have so that the gen5 slots could get more bandwidth and even then only one of the gen5 slots is issue free, one of them if you connect a gen5 drive to it will steal lanes away from the GPU



So in summary, be careful which slots you use because you may get unexpected performance and think your drive is broken when it's not
 
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Grim5 said:
Something that can limit speed is Nvme slot you use, not likely to be cause of just having slow writes but something I ran into recently

I replaced my 990 pro with an sn850x and when I did this instead of putting the sn850x back into the gen5x4 slot I put it into a gen4x4. That should still be perfectly fine but I found both my sequential read and writes were capped at 6300 MB/s.

At first I thought ok maybe that's normal forbthe drive and it wasn't until techpowerup released a review of my motherboard a few days ago that I figured out Asus did some weird things with lane management on this board and the review was showing the same 6300mbps cap on the slot I was using and it showed the other gen4x4 slot had a cap of 6000 MB/s and the only Nvme slots that can do full gen4 speed is the two gen5x4 slots so I moved the drive


The cause of all of this seems to be because AMD's x670 chipsets cannot handle a Gen 5 SSD and a Gen 5 GPU and Thunderbolt 4 all at the same time and that's why AMD gave the boards two chipsets but even then it's complicated and can't deliver full bandwidth to everything at once, so Asus and likely others have had to be very creative with how they manage bandwidth around the board and in my case they choose to limit how much bandwidth the gen4 Nvme slots have so that the gen5 slots could get more bandwidth and even then only one of the gen5 slots is issue free, one of them if you connect a gen5 drive to it will steal lanes away from the GPU



So in summary, be careful which slots you use because you may get unexpected performance and think your drive is broken when it's not
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In my case it was the other way around... I put the 990 PRO in the Gen 5 SSD slot but the Nvidia 4090 went from PCIe 4.0 x16 to PCIe 4.0 x8 which is equivalent to 3.0 x16...

The explanation was because the SSD and 4090 can't do PCIe 5.0 and the gen 5 SSD slot will replace the 2nd PCIE slot and in PCIe 5.0 both interfaces will run at x8 simultaneously putting an SSD in the gen 5 slot was a bad idea... Until we find a gen 5.0 capable GPU and SSD I think it's all marketing gimmicks
 
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