Samsung has released a firmware update for its flagship 990 Pro SSD. No official patch notes have been made available, though it is highly likely that the update was issued to resolve recent health-related problems.
SSDs can be fickle things, on the one hand they can be extremely fast, efficient, and reliable, yet when issues begin to occur they can be a pain to diagnose. Up until recently, Samsung SSDs have been renowned for their reliability. This changed after a small number of users reported experiencing rapid health deterioration for its high-end line of SSDs, specifically, the Samsung 990 Pro and 980 Pro.
Samsung initially declined warranty claims for RMA, stating that the health drop was within normal operation, though pushback from the web community resulted in further investigation on the issue, which in turn leads us to the firmware update in question.
A moderator on Samsung’s community page, DavidB, explained the update as follows: “Samsung has been investigating customer inquiries about anomalies related to the SMART of the 990 Pro SSD. 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.”
There’s good and there’s bad news. The update fixes the accelerated health decline bug users are currently facing, but unfortunately doesn’t resolve or reset the S.M.A.R.T values to factory settings. Meaning if your SSD reports say, a 70 per cent overall condition as a result of the bug, it will unfortunately remain at 70 per cent but won’t decline any further.
All in all, it’s a rather unfortunate bump in the road for what is otherwise one of the best SSDs on the market today. The positive takeaway is that Samsung has at least acknowledged the issue, and hopefully those who seek to RMA their devices won’t encounter any problems from the manufacturer as a result.
For those affected, the update can be downloaded from Samsung Magician over here.
