>
Previously tracked reports That Samsung’s 990 Pro solid state drives (SSDs) who suddenly fell into ill health and had reached the company, a solution is now available.
PC gamer (opens in new tab) found a similar issue affecting Samsung 980Pro SSDs were also found and repaired earlier this month, making it a bad time to own the company’s high performance M.2 NVME drives.
Given that older firmware reportedly kills drives en masse, users who even suspect they have a 980 Pro or 990 Pro in their setup should download the latest firmware version from Samsung’s free SSD performance tool Magician (opens in new tab).
Samsung’s SSD problems
Aside from the released updates, which come without patch notes, Samsung has been less helpful with support for affected users.
At the time of PC Gamer’s report, Samsung had not officially acknowledged the issue, particularly for its 990 Pro SSDs. This meant that, according to Newwin (opens in new tab) editor Robbie Khan, the company could fool him by claiming to have found “no defect” in its 990 Pro SSD and refusing to repair it.
Now that there’s official confirmation of the issue for (hopefully the only) affected drive models, users looking for outright replacements for their drives should have an easier time getting them.
That could be crucial given that, per Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab)the firmware update prevents, but does not reverse, damage to SSDs.
The good news is that there are fixes and they couldn’t be easier to apply. The bad news is that the issues could affect other drives (this 970 Pro owner is keeping an eye out), and firmware fixes may not be enough for some.