Samsung has released new firmware for its latest and greatest SSD, and owners should probably install it ASAP. The Samsung 990 Pro SSD has a reliability problem, and this firmware update appears to result from Samsung’s promised investigation. Your drive won’t be as good as new after the update, but we can only hope the drives won’t degrade anymore.
The issue first cropped up several weeks ago when Neowin’s Robbie Khan realized that his 990 Pro was degrading much faster than it should. An NVMe SSD should handle a few years of intense usage before wear becomes an issue, but Khan’s drive dropped about 1% per week. I have a 990 Pro as well, and my drive was dropping just as fast — it’s currently at 89% after 2.7TB of writes. An SSD that works correctly would still be at 100%.
To get the new firmware, you’ll need Samsung’s Magician SSD app. It will detect your drives, and if you’ve got a 990 Pro, will offer firmware version 1B2QJXD7. If you’re on Linux or don’t want to use Magician, Samsung also offers ISO files that can be used to create bootable USB drives. There’s no changelog to confirm it addresses the degradation issue, but we know Samsung is actively investigating. It would odd to release an unrelated update. We’ve reached out to Samsung for confirmation and will update you if we hear back.
Installing the firmware only takes a few seconds, but you’ll need to restart the system afterward. The update will not reset the health stats, so a drive that claims to be degraded by 11%, like mine, will still report that. Ars Technica speculates that the drive may be unable to tell the difference between real wear and the incorrectly tabulated wear from before the update. The bug may also have caused the drives to degrade faster, in which case the pre-update readings are accurate, and therefore you wouldn’t want it to be reset.
Separate from the 990 issue, Samsung also recently released a firmware update for the last-gen 980 SSD to address reliability issues. With two serious reliability issues in a row, Samsung risks no longer being seen as the premiere maker of NVMe SSDs. Custom PC builder Puget announced that it would stop using Samsung’s drives going forward and probably won’t be alone.
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