Following earlier reports that Samsung’s 990 Pro solid state drives (SSDs) suddenly falling into poor health had reached the company, a fix is now available.
PC Gamer (opens in new tab) found a similar issue affecting Samsung 980 Pro SSDs was also found and fixed earlier this month, making it a bad time to be the owner of the company’s high performance M.2 NVME drives.
Given that older firmware is reportedly killing drives en-masse, users with even a suspicion that they have a 980 Pro or 990 Pro in their configuration should download the latest firmware version from Samsung’s free SSD performance tool Magician (opens in new tab).
Samsung's SSD woes
Beyond the issued updates, which come without any patch notes, Samsung has been less than forthcoming with support for affected users.
At the time of PC Gamer’s report, Samsung hadn’t officially acknowledged the issue for its 990 Pro SSDs in particular. This meant that, as according to Neowin (opens in new tab) editor Robbie Khan, the company could take him for a fool by claiming to have found “no defect” in his 990 Pro SSD and refusing to repair it.
Now that an official acknowledgement of the issue is here for (hopefully the only) affected drive models, users looking for outright replacements for their drives should have an easier time of getting them.
That could be crucial, given that, per Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab), the firmware update is preventing damage to SSDs, but not reversing it.
The good news is that fixes are here and they couldn’t be easier to apply. The bad news is that the issues could go on to affect other drives (this 970 Pro owner is keeping a close eye out), and firmware fixes may not be enough for some.
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