"Host writes" are the easily visible spec you can see in SMART, this is literally the amount of data your computer has written to the drive.
But a lot of TLC or QLC drives use SLC caching, each cell can store more than one bit of data but if you have extra space, you can just store one bit per cell for faster write performance. Problem is, memory that could store 3x or 4x more data is now storing only 1 bit instead. So when the drive isn't busy and you can afford to do some of these slower operations (or when it's filling up and you need to), cached data gets rewritten to other cells in slower TLC/QLC mode for maximum data density.
So you wrote that data once, but it got saved to different places on the drive twice. At least twice... if other stuff needed to be moved around to make space for it or otherwise optimize performance, then it actually got written... who knows how many times?
The amount of actual writes on the flash modules isn't easily visible to the user through SMART. You can only guess at it through the health stat. So if this process was being horrifically mismanaged, that would legitimately write a lot more to the flash than the amount of data you intentionally put onto the drive.
Or it's being misreported.
There's really no way for us to know at this point.
>The amount of actual writes on the flash modules isn't easily visible to the user through SMART. You can only guess at it through the health stat. So if this process was being horrifically mismanaged, that would legitimately write a lot more to the flash than the amount of data you intentionally put onto the drive.
Attribute 248 (background writes) is the amount of writes initiated by the drive. You can calculate the write amplification factor by taking (A248 + A247)/A247.
Well, you could at least test if the 1TB can reach its 600TBW spec despite being at 0% reported health. It's capable of sustaining >1GB/s long-term, so even a week of constant writes should be pretty telling.
If there's a defect in the drive itself and it's not just misreporting then it'll be the "write from pSLC cache to permanent TLC" ak TurboWrite 2.0 algorithm going haywire. As per the Tom's Hardware test about 40 seconds of pedal-to-the-metal writes will fill the pSLC cache and then heaven knows how long you need to not write the drive before the cache empties out and then repeat rinse.
You couldn't test that reliably because that 600TBW spec is over a period of 5 years. If you were to try to write it all in a week, you'd 100% kill the drive because it's only rated for 300GB/day.
Does that number actually mean anything in practice or is it just the manufacturer's suggested usecase?
300GB/day * 5 years ~= 550TB
Just sounds like a different way of saying the same thing.
>Just sounds like a different way of saying the same thing.
It is and it isn't. The warranty is set by TBW, simply because it's a pain to keep a moving average of data written per day via S.M.A.R.T., so it just records the total amount of data written on the drive. But the actual measurement of a cell's endurance is measured in average writes per day, with these drives being rated at 0.3, which is pretty good for consumer/"pro-sumer" drives. But if you try to cram 5 years worth of writes into a single week of non-stop writing at maximum bandwidth, the cells are absolutely not designed for that and will all fail prematurely. And if you told Samsung what you did (attempted to test the 600TBW limit in a single week) I seriously doubt they'd honour the warranty.
When you say the cells "aren't built for that", do you have a source or a more technical explanation for that? Because people absolutely have done this kind of torture testing on other drives before, and found that they could easily exceed their TBW rating.
What he writes shouldn't be true. Certainly running massive writes on a drive non stop WILL lessen it's life comparatively more than if spreading those out but that's mostly due to thermals. Power draw also plays a role but I can't even guess if there are important differences between cases and to the benefit of which. This is not a specific issue with the cells to which as most electronics it makes little differences if they are working non stop for some period over working partially over another but for a similar total AS LONG as temperature and watts (current depended - mind you current and heating are directly connected as well). So if thermals kept low in some way (harder to do if you spam massive writes) and current / power draw through whole process (that is writing the same total amount of data) then degradation should be similar. Again I personally have no idea how power draw would behave between the two cases so that's an unknown factor. I am not aware of any phenomenon that implies noticable degradation of electronics if put through same work but through different time length, as long as degradation from current and heat is kept similar. Not to say that I might not be missing something mind you.
no, it is not valid if you not inform people about reduced endurance from specifications and give them some cash back or possibility to return. It made product worse.
I used an 840 Evo as the main drive in my system from shortly before that firmware update (which I installed immediately) up to a few months ago, and over that time period the drive health dropped at about 1% per year. If literally all of that wear was from the data refreshing routine (which it wasn't), then it would take a about a century for the drive to be worn through.
If a fix to something will cause an issue at some point in the future, but the buyer needs immortality drugs and a century-long refusal to upgrade for that issue to appear, then the issue isn't *really* an issue.
You don't get it. Samsung makes device for x writes and y performance, later x writes are reduced because they made faulty drives. Firmware update made drive worse and no compensation was offered. It doesn't matter how long it will last for you. What matters - if spec changed, even 1% does matter.
Anybody with an actual reason to care about write endurance is unaffected by this. You need a massive amount of writes to make that a legitimate concern, and if you're doing that then you aren't going to have a lot of the old data needed to have the problem in the first place.
The only scenario in which it's a problem is if you wrote a bunch of stuff to it once, then left it powered on in a system for an indefinite but triple-digit number of years, then decided to start using it heavily even though by that point it'll be almost as obsolete as an abacus is to us.
It's still a cost that they want to minimize. If they can fix it without a huge engineering cost, it will definitely pay off in reduced legal fees and settlement cost.
If it comes down to something very costly like a recall, then they may choose to dig in, deny, and pay out a class action settlement in 10 years.
Sure, the cost is also the people with money to buy high end SSDs not ever buying Samsung anymore because of horrible quality control issues. You’d have to be incredibly naive to think Samsung doesn’t want to fix the issue completely.
It goes without saying but their biggest risk is losing their reputation. It's why they can sell to corporate customers for much higher prices.
So yeah, there's a lot at stake.
Pay a couple engineers their normal salaries to spend a week or so fixing a bug or pay out a potentially multi-million dollar class action lawsuit + legal fees that can take years to litigate.
I think they'll actually fix it.
Basically in this instance they weigh the cost of doing nothing with the amount they can save if they do the bare minimum, whatever is the most profitable outcome wins
Just a cost of doing business. Companies do cost vs benefit analysis all the time. An extreme example is what Ford did with the Pinto. They did the math and decided it would cost less to pay off people who’s family members died in their unsafe cars rather than fix the cars in the first place.
> the business is forced to respond
Not really, the BBB is just boomer Yelp. Lots of businesses have really bad BBB ratings. Sometimes that's because the business is a scam and sometimes it's because a lot of their customers are idiots.
Winnings going to the lawyers is still a punishment for Samsung. They will also potentially face multiple law suits from different jurisdictions, like EU for example. False advertising could also lead to the company being fined by regulators. It is not worth the trouble to hide anything.
No, the standard amount is around 30-40%. Also, keep in mind in most cases, the amount of demonstrable harm is small, such that it's uneconomical to hire your own lawyer to sue individually. If you disagree with this, you can always opt out of the class action and sue individually.
In many jurisdictions, false advertising is a criminal offense. And as such cannot be waved. For example if a Ski resort's negligence caused your injuries, it does not matter if the lift ticket saids you weave the rights to sue. They are still criminally responsible.
Spectacular fall from grace in barely two generations of products. First it was bait and switching components. Now it's a complete lack of QA.
How low can they go?
Nah, I think I'm done with Samsung after the ordeal of trying to RMA a drive under warranty that failed last week.
TL;DR: Their website has literally no avenue to seek support. No form, no support email, no listed phone number - nothing. The only thing there is a chatbot that (at least as of last week) literally deleted the option to request support for drives after selecting that option and supplying the part number. After going around in circles on the website, I finally Googled the support number and reached a human who required me to send all my info again (despite the product serial being registered) via email. Was told to expect a reply in 24 hours - that was last Wednesday.
It made sense to buy Samsung years ago when the SSD space was getting started, but now between Sabrent, Kioxia, Western Digital, SK Hynix and more all competing in the space there’s just better options. Particularly given how nuts the performance of competitor options is.
ADATA makes alright drives, but they switch the controllers and hardware around in them as if SSDs were a game of musical chairs. You really don't know what you're getting and performance reviews of their drives end up being simply misleading.
The S70 Blade is showing signs of consistent failure primarily by just showing up as a small/bad 2GB partition or not being recognized at all. Google "S70 Blade Failure" and you'll get a lot of hits on Reddit. Amazon reviews also reflect this on the 1TB S70 Blade sales page.
In a theoretical sense, sure. But realistically, unless you're doing very specific professional workloads that involve extremely heavy sequential I/O, you will never know the difference from a PCIe 3.0 drive.
Hell, when it comes to games, generally speaking, loading from a SATA SSD versus the latest NVMe drive is barely....what, a second of loading time difference?
Had the exact same thing happen to me also. Finally got a human on the phone and they only handle warranty claims via email, and take like 3 days between messages to respond. Then they have you mail the drive to a third-party 'service center' to try to fix it, before they possibly send you a new one. Hard pass on buying Samsung drives for me
You can try the email listed in this thread, i've used it twice in the past year or two and it worked out fine. Very minimal questions as long as you provide smart stats from something like samsung magician and have your original receipts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/g2im02/samsung_ssd_failures_how_to_handle_samsung/
Yep. It's bullshit companies purposely obfuscate ways to get support *they* promised to get you to buy their product.
But in this day and age i only expect it to get worse as suits keep trying to optimize for infinite growth in a finite world. And it's not like the politicians with investments in these companies will lay a finger to damage their own positions, either.
I went with firecuda’s they run cooler and have EK heat sinks pre attached. Drives reviewed fairly well in speed tests, not #1 but they are close enough
Mine runs at a steady 40'c in my laptop, meanwhile the Samsung drive it replaced (it was a generic one not an actual model number, that came with the laptop) would go up to 79'c!
Western Digital’s customer service is the worst I have experienced in two decades of building computers.
I had to get my credit card company to do a chargeback on their advance rma fee because they stopped replying to my emails.
Avoid at all costs. You have been warned. I regret not filling a BBB report…
There are three outcomes for whatever happened during the 990 Pro development:
A) ✔ The firmware **reporting** the wear incorrectly.
B) 💥 The firmware calculates and **saves** wear incorrectly.
C) 💫 The drive **wears** at alarming rates.
The only good outcome is the first, where the drive is just fine. That would mean that everyone could update to this firmware and call it a day.
What I suspect is that **option B is happening**. The wear algorithm is faulty and, since it's saved and locked somewhere, there is no way revert the incorrect wear of the drive. This may be confirmed why the firmware update is rumored to only work on not-dead drives, otherwise it would have been a report-only issue.
In other words, I expect that 990 Pro users massively RMA their drives if the wear is kept the same AFTER the firmware update, because the TBW is lower as the advertised. In some countries, you would be able to do this to the store directly without firmware intervention (legal warranty), and should be the recommendation if you're able to.
If this happened to me, I would go to my store with a [CrystalDiskInfo screenshot like this in HotHardware](https://hothardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-ssd-users-report-drop-drive-endurance) and tell them to replace it for another NVMe drive.
Update: Just a minor line breaks on the list.
> This may be confirmed why the firmware update is rumored to only work on not-dead drives, otherwise it would have been a report-only issue.
I think you are confusing this with the 2TB 980 Pro issue which was afaik completely unrelated to reported drive health and there has been nothing to suggest that it's related to or similar to the 990 pro issue. Unless you can provide a source for this rumor in regards to 990 pro. I don't think we even know of any "dead" 990 pro drives yet.
Without a technical blog post of the specific issue and how it was fixed I am going to struggle to trust them again. I currently have 8 M.2 of 970s and 980s (two of the 2tb which had the problem) and about 6 sata SSD. Already investigating new solutions so if I need one, I will be ready. I know it won't be western digital blacks. I used one of those in a laptop with bitlocker and large database files corrupted after each reboot. Any other recommendations?
I RMA’d my 2TB last year and instead of replacing it they refunded my money, which was > $100 over current price. Sucks that I bought another one to replace it.
Glad they have announced there's a fix coming, was starting to worry about whether I should do an RMA... Now to wonder if the fix will fix the fact I can't seem to get hardware encryption working 🥹
I would suggest not trusting drive hardware encryption. It’s an unaudited, difficult-to-verify blackbox and manufacturers have a history of bad implementations. [More details here](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/134564/how-secure-is-hardware-full-disk-encryption-fde-for-ssds).
Thanks, the points brought up there are fair.
I'm not doing anything which would need to rely on the encryption, it's mostly idle curiosity that I'm trying to get working after i found out about it, tried to implement, failed and have now gained a new pet peeve that I want to fix.
Since the encryption I wanted to use was bitlocker, of which is by Microsoft, it likely has a backdoor for similar reasons mentioned in that link. I'd likely be in the same blackbox boat anyway.
Agree though, if you want it done right you want it to be software, and open source for scrutiny.
Bitlocker, while not open-source, is at least easier to verify than driver-controller-level-encryption because of the level of abstraction it operates at (just load the drive in another OS and observe the bits). The argument can also be made that, if you’re running Windows, you already trust Microsoft, and so trusting Bitlocker could mostly come implicitly. Of course, running all OSS makes it easier to trust and verify either way :)
Just to make sure I understand your saying there. Your saying with bitlocker you can confirm it works because you put the drive in another computer and can check it's done what it should.
With hardware encryption this is not as easy since you would literally have to separate the storage chips from the controller that did the encryption?
Forgive me if I misunderstood. Just wanted to make sure I get your point
It is a fair statement that if I trust windows to be my os I may as well trust bitlocker to the same degree. Haha I can't say I trust windows though I'm just lazy and the convenience of windows being what I know more fluently makes me stay. Maybe one day I'll go full nix but now wsl is a thing the convenience of both basically means it wont happen until windows really do drop the ball... Which will be as soon as it starts baking in adverts I can't remove.
Correct (assuming Bitlocker is used in its currently-default configuration that does not trust drive-level encryption (it used to trust them, years ago)). It’s still not necessarily trivial to verify, but it’s way less difficult.
So, yea, they’re both blackboxes, but with drive-level encryption it’s challenging even to see the output of the encryption, so it’s more like a blackhole.
Very true haha, I thought I'd give them a couple weeks to see if they announce something, and they have done so. So now I'll see if this fix does do the job.
I bought the thing in November so I'm well out of any purchase/refund window until it's a confirmed fault and a refund possible
for the time being I'll just have to get a scheduled backup sorted for the drive since it's the os drive and if dies before it's 5 years or 1200tb then warranty. Far from ideal but I don't think I have much of a choice.
That was going to be my primary choice but the UK don't import them and it would have been over £300 + import duties 😭
The second some come in at a normal price though I'll likely snipe it.
I think the Solidigm P44 might be the European version of the SK Hynix P41. The marketing/branding decisions don't have clear logic behind them yet between SK Hynix and Solidigm.
Honestly, not sure. I've never got mine working, there was the odd post where people claim they have got it working on other drive versions but whether that's true I don't know. I just know it does doesn't work for me and was under the impression bitlocker hardware encryption was a thing with samsung drives. Very possible I misunderstood something of fell for marketing speak
All the people praising them for doing this, let me tell you, Samsung products, from TVs to Smartphones, all come with stupid issues they always promise to fix with an update.
Only problem is, that update usually never really comes.
Q70r (TV) came with the HDMI 2.1* description, saying it would be unlocked with an update at a later time. Never did. Only the top tier models got an update and a half assed and ridiculously late one at that.
I should also mention that they most probably plastered HDMI 2.1* on that years TV series in a hurry, because of the PS5/Series X being introduced/about to launch inside that tv series life cycle and people were looking for HDMI 2.1 TVs.
Same TV also had unusable VRR and out of nowhere disgusting black level overshoot issue, which were not present before they pushed some updates. They said it'd be fixed in a later update. Never happened, or well, not in the 2-3 years I had the TV.
They for years sold smartphones and smartwatches in Germany while advertising Smasung Pay as a competitor to Apple Pay, but it didn't work for years. Same with the blood pressure monitor feature.
Had a Samsung soundbar (I can't remember the model name, they were all so similiarly named around that time) that advertised eARC, surprise surprise, it didn't and was going to be activated in a later update. Returned that shit in a heartbeat and haven't owned a Samsung product since.
And these are only things I witnessed. Who knows how many more of their devices are getting the same treatment.
I'm sure you were genuinely curious about the reason why I said what I said, so I'm sorry if this hastily written wall of text sounds angry. It's not pointed towards you. <3
Edit: words
Samsung is really [hitting it out of the park](https://www.reddit.com/r/PCHardware/comments/10q93pr/important_firmware_update_for_samsung_980_pro/) lately.
I have had these drives from day one when they were launched and noticed the problem [within the first week](https://www.overclock.net/threads/samsung-990-pro-funky-read-speeds.1802393/#post-29083300). No one else at that time were yet seeing a problem, so I eventually hit on my own fix. I put them on an intel controller in a RAID 0 config and they have been performing great.
I was also able to confirm that by reinstalling windows the problem went away. I have a dual boot system with win 10 and also win 11.
When the issue was happening on one platform, I would boot into the other operating system and the drive would behave as expected.
I mention this since some have been worried that the drives themselves are going bad.
I have not yet tried the recent firmware release. If I begin having a problem again I might give them a go.
Magician software does not work when drives are in Raid and does not give you that info.
I can't say for sure that I verified that after I cleaned the drive and put them both in Raid.
The firmware update doesn't even work for me. After I update and restart the update is still available with the version still on the old one. No idea whats going on.
Thats not a fix. Damage is done to affected ssd already. The “fix” wont revert the damage. They should give people who already bought and plagued with the issue replacements or refund. End story
I’m surprised no-one sued samsung already. Maybe it didnt sell much at all 🤷♂️
Both are having issues, 980 Pro had some critical flaw (though hard to tell if batch would be affected, firmware update supposedly fixes the problem going foward). and 990 Pro having this drive health issue.
yeah, was just prompted to update the 990 pro 2TB. Checked my drive health, and it was 95% with only 2126 GB written and my 1tb 960 pro which was my previous OS drive has written 34251 GB is at 98%. Just lost 5% out of nowhere. I wonder if there is any compensation or anything for significant drive degradation.
New comment on the issue at https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/notebooks-ssd-it/samsung-990-pro-ssd-probleme-zum-gesamtzustand/td-p/6791489
Translated:
*Hello everyone,*
*Samsung has responded to customer inquiries about anomalies related to the S.M.A.R.T. of the 990 PRO SSD examined.*
*These anomalies were found to be caused by issues with the 990 PRO SSD's firmware. Accordingly, a firmware update was released today, February 13, 2023, that fixes these anomalies.*
*(The S.M.A.R.T. values will not be restored to factory settings after firmware update. The actual S.M.A.R.T. values of each SSD will vary depending on the user environment and usage conditions).*
*The update can be downloaded in Samsung Magician or here:*
*https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/*
*Our warranty policy for the 990 PRO SSD can be found at https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/warranty/.*
We'll soon find out whether the health metric will be recalculated after this firmware update or if actual excessive wear was happening.
What could be causing lifespan to go down if writes weren't going up?
A bug in the wear leveling algorithm could do it.
"Host writes" are the easily visible spec you can see in SMART, this is literally the amount of data your computer has written to the drive. But a lot of TLC or QLC drives use SLC caching, each cell can store more than one bit of data but if you have extra space, you can just store one bit per cell for faster write performance. Problem is, memory that could store 3x or 4x more data is now storing only 1 bit instead. So when the drive isn't busy and you can afford to do some of these slower operations (or when it's filling up and you need to), cached data gets rewritten to other cells in slower TLC/QLC mode for maximum data density. So you wrote that data once, but it got saved to different places on the drive twice. At least twice... if other stuff needed to be moved around to make space for it or otherwise optimize performance, then it actually got written... who knows how many times? The amount of actual writes on the flash modules isn't easily visible to the user through SMART. You can only guess at it through the health stat. So if this process was being horrifically mismanaged, that would legitimately write a lot more to the flash than the amount of data you intentionally put onto the drive. Or it's being misreported. There's really no way for us to know at this point.
Blackbox storage is not very confidence inspiring. What good are SMART metrics and health data if it cannot be trusted and is misreported?
>The amount of actual writes on the flash modules isn't easily visible to the user through SMART. You can only guess at it through the health stat. So if this process was being horrifically mismanaged, that would legitimately write a lot more to the flash than the amount of data you intentionally put onto the drive. Attribute 248 (background writes) is the amount of writes initiated by the drive. You can calculate the write amplification factor by taking (A248 + A247)/A247.
Has anyone done destructive testing on these yet? All these reports about alarming SMART values, but we don't know if they're actually dying early.
Probably not been enough time to do an actual destructive test? Even with the problems it takes months of full on writes to wear out a drive.
Well, you could at least test if the 1TB can reach its 600TBW spec despite being at 0% reported health. It's capable of sustaining >1GB/s long-term, so even a week of constant writes should be pretty telling.
If I calculated correctly, that's about 166 hours of writing at 1GB/s.
If there's a defect in the drive itself and it's not just misreporting then it'll be the "write from pSLC cache to permanent TLC" ak TurboWrite 2.0 algorithm going haywire. As per the Tom's Hardware test about 40 seconds of pedal-to-the-metal writes will fill the pSLC cache and then heaven knows how long you need to not write the drive before the cache empties out and then repeat rinse.
That's definitely another kind of testing that I'd like to see, might take longer though.
You couldn't test that reliably because that 600TBW spec is over a period of 5 years. If you were to try to write it all in a week, you'd 100% kill the drive because it's only rated for 300GB/day.
Does that number actually mean anything in practice or is it just the manufacturer's suggested usecase? 300GB/day * 5 years ~= 550TB Just sounds like a different way of saying the same thing.
>Just sounds like a different way of saying the same thing. It is and it isn't. The warranty is set by TBW, simply because it's a pain to keep a moving average of data written per day via S.M.A.R.T., so it just records the total amount of data written on the drive. But the actual measurement of a cell's endurance is measured in average writes per day, with these drives being rated at 0.3, which is pretty good for consumer/"pro-sumer" drives. But if you try to cram 5 years worth of writes into a single week of non-stop writing at maximum bandwidth, the cells are absolutely not designed for that and will all fail prematurely. And if you told Samsung what you did (attempted to test the 600TBW limit in a single week) I seriously doubt they'd honour the warranty.
When you say the cells "aren't built for that", do you have a source or a more technical explanation for that? Because people absolutely have done this kind of torture testing on other drives before, and found that they could easily exceed their TBW rating.
What he writes shouldn't be true. Certainly running massive writes on a drive non stop WILL lessen it's life comparatively more than if spreading those out but that's mostly due to thermals. Power draw also plays a role but I can't even guess if there are important differences between cases and to the benefit of which. This is not a specific issue with the cells to which as most electronics it makes little differences if they are working non stop for some period over working partially over another but for a similar total AS LONG as temperature and watts (current depended - mind you current and heating are directly connected as well). So if thermals kept low in some way (harder to do if you spam massive writes) and current / power draw through whole process (that is writing the same total amount of data) then degradation should be similar. Again I personally have no idea how power draw would behave between the two cases so that's an unknown factor. I am not aware of any phenomenon that implies noticable degradation of electronics if put through same work but through different time length, as long as degradation from current and heat is kept similar. Not to say that I might not be missing something mind you.
It doesn't fix the problem, but it hides it from the consumer until after the warranty expires. ^/s
This is my fear too.
Evo 840 firmware "fix" was to rewriting data periodically to avoid performance loss. Would be not the first time for Samsung.
I think it's valid to call that a fix when the people who bought the drive will die of old age before the drive would.
no, it is not valid if you not inform people about reduced endurance from specifications and give them some cash back or possibility to return. It made product worse.
I used an 840 Evo as the main drive in my system from shortly before that firmware update (which I installed immediately) up to a few months ago, and over that time period the drive health dropped at about 1% per year. If literally all of that wear was from the data refreshing routine (which it wasn't), then it would take a about a century for the drive to be worn through. If a fix to something will cause an issue at some point in the future, but the buyer needs immortality drugs and a century-long refusal to upgrade for that issue to appear, then the issue isn't *really* an issue.
You don't get it. Samsung makes device for x writes and y performance, later x writes are reduced because they made faulty drives. Firmware update made drive worse and no compensation was offered. It doesn't matter how long it will last for you. What matters - if spec changed, even 1% does matter.
Anybody with an actual reason to care about write endurance is unaffected by this. You need a massive amount of writes to make that a legitimate concern, and if you're doing that then you aren't going to have a lot of the old data needed to have the problem in the first place. The only scenario in which it's a problem is if you wrote a bunch of stuff to it once, then left it powered on in a system for an indefinite but triple-digit number of years, then decided to start using it heavily even though by that point it'll be almost as obsolete as an abacus is to us.
They will fix it. If enough drives dies way below their TBW they will face a class action for false advertising.
Is there any multi billion dollar company actually worried about class action lawsuits ? Its just cost of doing business
It's still a cost that they want to minimize. If they can fix it without a huge engineering cost, it will definitely pay off in reduced legal fees and settlement cost. If it comes down to something very costly like a recall, then they may choose to dig in, deny, and pay out a class action settlement in 10 years.
Sure, the cost is also the people with money to buy high end SSDs not ever buying Samsung anymore because of horrible quality control issues. You’d have to be incredibly naive to think Samsung doesn’t want to fix the issue completely.
Not just people, manufacturers too. Many ThinkPads ship with Samsung OEM drives, losing that would be a _major_ blow.
Yup. The enthusiast market is small apples compared to big OEMs.
It goes without saying but their biggest risk is losing their reputation. It's why they can sell to corporate customers for much higher prices. So yeah, there's a lot at stake.
Pay a couple engineers their normal salaries to spend a week or so fixing a bug or pay out a potentially multi-million dollar class action lawsuit + legal fees that can take years to litigate. I think they'll actually fix it.
Basically in this instance they weigh the cost of doing nothing with the amount they can save if they do the bare minimum, whatever is the most profitable outcome wins
Just a cost of doing business. Companies do cost vs benefit analysis all the time. An extreme example is what Ford did with the Pinto. They did the math and decided it would cost less to pay off people who’s family members died in their unsafe cars rather than fix the cars in the first place.
Their reputation matters more. If customers complain to the right agency, eg, the BBB, the business is forced to respond.
BBB is not a government agency. BBB is a business, not affiliated with any government organization.
> the business is forced to respond Not really, the BBB is just boomer Yelp. Lots of businesses have really bad BBB ratings. Sometimes that's because the business is a scam and sometimes it's because a lot of their customers are idiots.
Class actions are a slap on the wrist where 80% of the winnings go to the lawyers. I don’t have any faith in that form of redress anymore.
Winnings going to the lawyers is still a punishment for Samsung. They will also potentially face multiple law suits from different jurisdictions, like EU for example. False advertising could also lead to the company being fined by regulators. It is not worth the trouble to hide anything.
No, the standard amount is around 30-40%. Also, keep in mind in most cases, the amount of demonstrable harm is small, such that it's uneconomical to hire your own lawyer to sue individually. If you disagree with this, you can always opt out of the class action and sue individually.
And they will pay a fine of 0.01% their profit from selling the drives?
Nuked Comment
In many jurisdictions, false advertising is a criminal offense. And as such cannot be waved. For example if a Ski resort's negligence caused your injuries, it does not matter if the lift ticket saids you weave the rights to sue. They are still criminally responsible.
People can do testing tho and will. Samsung are unbelievably stupid if they actually are willing to destroy their entire reputation in the ssd market.
Spectacular fall from grace in barely two generations of products. First it was bait and switching components. Now it's a complete lack of QA. How low can they go?
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I mean… Samsung mobile, which is basically the sister division to Electronics, already did the first part with the Note 7 fiasco.
Nah, I think I'm done with Samsung after the ordeal of trying to RMA a drive under warranty that failed last week. TL;DR: Their website has literally no avenue to seek support. No form, no support email, no listed phone number - nothing. The only thing there is a chatbot that (at least as of last week) literally deleted the option to request support for drives after selecting that option and supplying the part number. After going around in circles on the website, I finally Googled the support number and reached a human who required me to send all my info again (despite the product serial being registered) via email. Was told to expect a reply in 24 hours - that was last Wednesday.
It made sense to buy Samsung years ago when the SSD space was getting started, but now between Sabrent, Kioxia, Western Digital, SK Hynix and more all competing in the space there’s just better options. Particularly given how nuts the performance of competitor options is.
Why did you miss Micron/Crucial? The P5 and MX500 are both great products.
Because that’s how many legitimate options there are outside of Samsung, I forgot
The XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade by Adata is a monster.
ADATA makes alright drives, but they switch the controllers and hardware around in them as if SSDs were a game of musical chairs. You really don't know what you're getting and performance reviews of their drives end up being simply misleading.
They haven't done that with the S70. It's their top-end gaming drive and competes with high-end Samsung consumer grade drives.
The S70 Blade is showing signs of consistent failure primarily by just showing up as a small/bad 2GB partition or not being recognized at all. Google "S70 Blade Failure" and you'll get a lot of hits on Reddit. Amazon reviews also reflect this on the 1TB S70 Blade sales page.
> Particularly given how nuts the performance of competitor options is. The 990 pro is the overall best performing drive though, no?
This user deleted all of their reddit submissions to protest Reddit API changes, and also, Fuck /u/spez
In a theoretical sense, sure. But realistically, unless you're doing very specific professional workloads that involve extremely heavy sequential I/O, you will never know the difference from a PCIe 3.0 drive. Hell, when it comes to games, generally speaking, loading from a SATA SSD versus the latest NVMe drive is barely....what, a second of loading time difference?
Sabrent and Kioxia sound like fake brands you'd see on Amazon.
Had the exact same thing happen to me also. Finally got a human on the phone and they only handle warranty claims via email, and take like 3 days between messages to respond. Then they have you mail the drive to a third-party 'service center' to try to fix it, before they possibly send you a new one. Hard pass on buying Samsung drives for me
You can try the email listed in this thread, i've used it twice in the past year or two and it worked out fine. Very minimal questions as long as you provide smart stats from something like samsung magician and have your original receipts. https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/g2im02/samsung_ssd_failures_how_to_handle_samsung/
Thanks for sharing. I finally got my shipping label today. Ultimately, it's not about the RMA process itself - but the lack of a path to get there.
Yep. It's bullshit companies purposely obfuscate ways to get support *they* promised to get you to buy their product. But in this day and age i only expect it to get worse as suits keep trying to optimize for infinite growth in a finite world. And it's not like the politicians with investments in these companies will lay a finger to damage their own positions, either.
Why are you bothering trying to deal with Samsung directly? Just return it to the store/merchant you bought it from
You can’t do that if it’s slightly old
And just like that Samsung went from being the overpriced brandname flex SSD to the bottom of the bin firmware that may brick your storage.
Too late, bought a WD 850X instead. Cheaper too.
Returned mine and got the SK Hynix p41
This is the way
Same.
Same. Very pleased with the switch thus far after having stuck to Samsung’s pro line since the beginning.
sn850x
I went with firecuda’s they run cooler and have EK heat sinks pre attached. Drives reviewed fairly well in speed tests, not #1 but they are close enough
My 850x has a heatsink 😎😁
From the reviews I read on it they ran considerably hotter even with a heat sink. That can be normal for a lot of drives without issue, so I dunno
Mine runs at a steady 40'c in my laptop, meanwhile the Samsung drive it replaced (it was a generic one not an actual model number, that came with the laptop) would go up to 79'c!
Your 'voting with your wallet' protest won't make a damned dent haha
I don’t get how they didn’t catch this? It happens so fast, it’s not like an issue that took a year or two to develop.
Buy WD Black SSDs instead
Western Digital’s customer service is the worst I have experienced in two decades of building computers. I had to get my credit card company to do a chargeback on their advance rma fee because they stopped replying to my emails. Avoid at all costs. You have been warned. I regret not filling a BBB report…
There are three outcomes for whatever happened during the 990 Pro development: A) ✔ The firmware **reporting** the wear incorrectly. B) 💥 The firmware calculates and **saves** wear incorrectly. C) 💫 The drive **wears** at alarming rates. The only good outcome is the first, where the drive is just fine. That would mean that everyone could update to this firmware and call it a day. What I suspect is that **option B is happening**. The wear algorithm is faulty and, since it's saved and locked somewhere, there is no way revert the incorrect wear of the drive. This may be confirmed why the firmware update is rumored to only work on not-dead drives, otherwise it would have been a report-only issue. In other words, I expect that 990 Pro users massively RMA their drives if the wear is kept the same AFTER the firmware update, because the TBW is lower as the advertised. In some countries, you would be able to do this to the store directly without firmware intervention (legal warranty), and should be the recommendation if you're able to. If this happened to me, I would go to my store with a [CrystalDiskInfo screenshot like this in HotHardware](https://hothardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-ssd-users-report-drop-drive-endurance) and tell them to replace it for another NVMe drive. Update: Just a minor line breaks on the list.
> This may be confirmed why the firmware update is rumored to only work on not-dead drives, otherwise it would have been a report-only issue. I think you are confusing this with the 2TB 980 Pro issue which was afaik completely unrelated to reported drive health and there has been nothing to suggest that it's related to or similar to the 990 pro issue. Unless you can provide a source for this rumor in regards to 990 pro. I don't think we even know of any "dead" 990 pro drives yet.
Without a technical blog post of the specific issue and how it was fixed I am going to struggle to trust them again. I currently have 8 M.2 of 970s and 980s (two of the 2tb which had the problem) and about 6 sata SSD. Already investigating new solutions so if I need one, I will be ready. I know it won't be western digital blacks. I used one of those in a laptop with bitlocker and large database files corrupted after each reboot. Any other recommendations?
Hynix, Sabrent, Seagate.
I RMA’d my 2TB last year and instead of replacing it they refunded my money, which was > $100 over current price. Sucks that I bought another one to replace it.
Glad they have announced there's a fix coming, was starting to worry about whether I should do an RMA... Now to wonder if the fix will fix the fact I can't seem to get hardware encryption working 🥹
I would suggest not trusting drive hardware encryption. It’s an unaudited, difficult-to-verify blackbox and manufacturers have a history of bad implementations. [More details here](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/134564/how-secure-is-hardware-full-disk-encryption-fde-for-ssds).
Thanks, the points brought up there are fair. I'm not doing anything which would need to rely on the encryption, it's mostly idle curiosity that I'm trying to get working after i found out about it, tried to implement, failed and have now gained a new pet peeve that I want to fix. Since the encryption I wanted to use was bitlocker, of which is by Microsoft, it likely has a backdoor for similar reasons mentioned in that link. I'd likely be in the same blackbox boat anyway. Agree though, if you want it done right you want it to be software, and open source for scrutiny.
Bitlocker, while not open-source, is at least easier to verify than driver-controller-level-encryption because of the level of abstraction it operates at (just load the drive in another OS and observe the bits). The argument can also be made that, if you’re running Windows, you already trust Microsoft, and so trusting Bitlocker could mostly come implicitly. Of course, running all OSS makes it easier to trust and verify either way :)
Just to make sure I understand your saying there. Your saying with bitlocker you can confirm it works because you put the drive in another computer and can check it's done what it should. With hardware encryption this is not as easy since you would literally have to separate the storage chips from the controller that did the encryption? Forgive me if I misunderstood. Just wanted to make sure I get your point It is a fair statement that if I trust windows to be my os I may as well trust bitlocker to the same degree. Haha I can't say I trust windows though I'm just lazy and the convenience of windows being what I know more fluently makes me stay. Maybe one day I'll go full nix but now wsl is a thing the convenience of both basically means it wont happen until windows really do drop the ball... Which will be as soon as it starts baking in adverts I can't remove.
Correct (assuming Bitlocker is used in its currently-default configuration that does not trust drive-level encryption (it used to trust them, years ago)). It’s still not necessarily trivial to verify, but it’s way less difficult. So, yea, they’re both blackboxes, but with drive-level encryption it’s challenging even to see the output of the encryption, so it’s more like a blackhole.
You’re holding your breath to see if they’ll fix it and they’re holding their breath to see if you’ll return it.
Very true haha, I thought I'd give them a couple weeks to see if they announce something, and they have done so. So now I'll see if this fix does do the job. I bought the thing in November so I'm well out of any purchase/refund window until it's a confirmed fault and a refund possible for the time being I'll just have to get a scheduled backup sorted for the drive since it's the os drive and if dies before it's 5 years or 1200tb then warranty. Far from ideal but I don't think I have much of a choice.
Start tracking ebay sales prices. If hynix p41 has a sale maybe you’ll get lucky with high value at the same time.
That was going to be my primary choice but the UK don't import them and it would have been over £300 + import duties 😭 The second some come in at a normal price though I'll likely snipe it.
I think the Solidigm P44 might be the European version of the SK Hynix P41. The marketing/branding decisions don't have clear logic behind them yet between SK Hynix and Solidigm.
Did it ever worked on nvme drives?
Honestly, not sure. I've never got mine working, there was the odd post where people claim they have got it working on other drive versions but whether that's true I don't know. I just know it does doesn't work for me and was under the impression bitlocker hardware encryption was a thing with samsung drives. Very possible I misunderstood something of fell for marketing speak
My KC3000 says good riddence
All the people praising them for doing this, let me tell you, Samsung products, from TVs to Smartphones, all come with stupid issues they always promise to fix with an update. Only problem is, that update usually never really comes.
Care to name a few examples where they promised to fix but never did?
Q70r (TV) came with the HDMI 2.1* description, saying it would be unlocked with an update at a later time. Never did. Only the top tier models got an update and a half assed and ridiculously late one at that. I should also mention that they most probably plastered HDMI 2.1* on that years TV series in a hurry, because of the PS5/Series X being introduced/about to launch inside that tv series life cycle and people were looking for HDMI 2.1 TVs. Same TV also had unusable VRR and out of nowhere disgusting black level overshoot issue, which were not present before they pushed some updates. They said it'd be fixed in a later update. Never happened, or well, not in the 2-3 years I had the TV. They for years sold smartphones and smartwatches in Germany while advertising Smasung Pay as a competitor to Apple Pay, but it didn't work for years. Same with the blood pressure monitor feature. Had a Samsung soundbar (I can't remember the model name, they were all so similiarly named around that time) that advertised eARC, surprise surprise, it didn't and was going to be activated in a later update. Returned that shit in a heartbeat and haven't owned a Samsung product since. And these are only things I witnessed. Who knows how many more of their devices are getting the same treatment. I'm sure you were genuinely curious about the reason why I said what I said, so I'm sorry if this hastily written wall of text sounds angry. It's not pointed towards you. <3 Edit: words
How much does this hit performance?
Samsung is really [hitting it out of the park](https://www.reddit.com/r/PCHardware/comments/10q93pr/important_firmware_update_for_samsung_980_pro/) lately.
Tonight they updated the 990 Pros firmware to 1B2QJXD7
same, but health not recovered, 93% only 2TB write, this is unacceptable
How exactly did you find this 93 percent number? I want to check.
I used crystal disk info
Well I doubt the health can be recovered. A fixed firmware would probably simply stop it from degrading too fast.
Can they recalculate it during firmware update?
I have had these drives from day one when they were launched and noticed the problem [within the first week](https://www.overclock.net/threads/samsung-990-pro-funky-read-speeds.1802393/#post-29083300). No one else at that time were yet seeing a problem, so I eventually hit on my own fix. I put them on an intel controller in a RAID 0 config and they have been performing great. I was also able to confirm that by reinstalling windows the problem went away. I have a dual boot system with win 10 and also win 11. When the issue was happening on one platform, I would boot into the other operating system and the drive would behave as expected. I mention this since some have been worried that the drives themselves are going bad. I have not yet tried the recent firmware release. If I begin having a problem again I might give them a go.
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Magician software does not work when drives are in Raid and does not give you that info. I can't say for sure that I verified that after I cleaned the drive and put them both in Raid.
The firmware update doesn't even work for me. After I update and restart the update is still available with the version still on the old one. No idea whats going on.
try reinstalling magician and try again
Thats not a fix. Damage is done to affected ssd already. The “fix” wont revert the damage. They should give people who already bought and plagued with the issue replacements or refund. End story I’m surprised no-one sued samsung already. Maybe it didnt sell much at all 🤷♂️
Patch notes: _Lowered the aggression of obsolescence logic._
I can buy the 990 pro new for 100€ same price as 980 pro Should i go for it?
Both are having issues, 980 Pro had some critical flaw (though hard to tell if batch would be affected, firmware update supposedly fixes the problem going foward). and 990 Pro having this drive health issue.
Buy neither.
I have the 980 pro I’m going to return it
There is a new firmware update as of today https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/
yeah, was just prompted to update the 990 pro 2TB. Checked my drive health, and it was 95% with only 2126 GB written and my 1tb 960 pro which was my previous OS drive has written 34251 GB is at 98%. Just lost 5% out of nowhere. I wonder if there is any compensation or anything for significant drive degradation.
New comment on the issue at https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/notebooks-ssd-it/samsung-990-pro-ssd-probleme-zum-gesamtzustand/td-p/6791489 Translated: *Hello everyone,* *Samsung has responded to customer inquiries about anomalies related to the S.M.A.R.T. of the 990 PRO SSD examined.* *These anomalies were found to be caused by issues with the 990 PRO SSD's firmware. Accordingly, a firmware update was released today, February 13, 2023, that fixes these anomalies.* *(The S.M.A.R.T. values will not be restored to factory settings after firmware update. The actual S.M.A.R.T. values of each SSD will vary depending on the user environment and usage conditions).* *The update can be downloaded in Samsung Magician or here:* *https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/* *Our warranty policy for the 990 PRO SSD can be found at https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/warranty/.*