Samsung Pro SSD reliability questioned as longtime partner moves to Sabrent

Samsung has built a solid reputation among PC enthusiasts when it comes to SSDs. Its Pro Series SSDs are often among the top reviewer recommendations for users looking for high-speed storage for large work files, applications, and boot drives. Over the past year, however, reliability issues with the Samsung 980 Pro and the most recent 990 Pro have tarnished that reputation. It’s become so noticeable that custom PC maker Puget Systems, Samsung’s main proponent of SSDs since SATA, has dropped Samsung’s 1TB and 2TB drives from its lineup.

For Puget, the problems with the Samsung SSDs that the 22-year-old PC boutique sells in their custom-built systems began with the September 2020 980 Pro. On Jan. 31, Puget wrote in a blog post that it “received a surprising number of reports of failed Samsung drives, especially with the 2TB version of the 980 Pro.

“The most common type of failure we have found is that drives are suddenly locked in read-only mode, rendering the drive unusable. If the failed drive is the primary drive, the system will not boot until the drive is replaced and the OS is reinstalled,” wrote Chris Newhart, Tier 2 Repair Specialist at Puget.

Samsung recently released a firmware update to fix the issues, and Puget noted that he’s been working with Samsung for several months to resolve the issues.

In August, Samsung released the 990 Pro to positive reviews from publications such as PCMag and Tom’s Hardware. But users have also started reporting reliability issues with this updated model.

In January, Neowin reported that the health of one of their 990 Pros had dropped to 95 percent after about a week and down to 2TB of disk writes. This was very different from their other (unspecified) Samsung SSD which was 1.5 years old with over 40TB recorded and 99 percent up.

But the experience, apparently, was not an anomaly.

According to Tom’s Hardware, various users online, including those on Reddit, Twitter, and the Overclock.net forums, have reported a rapid decline in health. One user reported that the 990 Pro shows 64% uptime with 2TB of written data.

Authorized device returns reportedly resulted in Samsung resetting the SSDs to factory settings and claiming they were not defective.

Samsung is reportedly working on the issue with Puget, but hasn’t made any public announcements. In the meantime, the damage has been done and trust, like the apparent lifespan of some 990 Pro users, has been shattered.

Puget, for example, is “shifting”from Samsung when it comes to 1TB and 2TB NVMe drives in favor of Sabrent’s offerings, “as this situation unfolds, we’ll learn more,”according to a blog post that was published on Thursday and seen Tom’s Equipment today. William George, a product engineer at Puget, wrote that “if the lifetime (and thus lifetime) of [Samsung’s] drives are really dropping at this rate, it’s very worrying.”

Puget is far from one of Samsung’s biggest partners, but the move and publicity illustrates the blow to Samsung’s SSD reputation over the past year. In the past, Puget has been quite vocal about Samsung’s SSDs and talked about their reliability. In 2016, it was said that Samsung’s SATA SSDs were “by far the most reliable PC component we’ve ever sold.”It was this strong support for Samsung SSDs that was the reason Puget decided to take a public stance on current drives.

Puget’s blog notes that “there’s a possibility that the issue with the 990 Pro is due to a misreporting of stamina loss.”The company will work with Samsung “to help find a solution”for Puget customers and the general public.

He said he helps customers who already have 980 Pro 2TB drives install the latest firmware. The company will still use the 500GB Samsung 980 Pro.