Puget Drops Samsung 990 Pro SSDs Due to Reliability Issues

What happened now? Puget Systems has stopped offering Samsung 990 Pro SSDs in new builds after multiple reports of performance issues. Problems arose last year when a custom PC assembler began seeing an abnormally high failure rate in the field on a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB model. Puget has been working with Samsung to help find the culprit, and just recently the Korean tech giant released a firmware update to fix the situation.

Meanwhile, the new Samsung 990 Pro began to show its own problems shortly after launch. In our review late last month, we highlighted user accounts on Reddit and elsewhere that have alarmingly low health scores on their 990 Pro. In one instance, SSD utilities showed that the user’s disk health had already dropped to 93 percent, despite having only written about 7TB. Another user reported that his drive was 36 percent worn after writing less than 2 TB of data.

puget said Samsung is currently looking into reports on the 990 Pro, but in the meantime the system builder has decided to switch to an alternative product offering while things unfold.

For 1TB and 2TB NVMe drives, Puget now uses SSDs from Sabrent. The company has been using 4TB and 8TB Sabrent drives for a while now and have had no issues with them. Their smallest variant, the 500GB model, will remain the Samsung 980 Pro given that this size is not available in the 990 Pro lineup and therefore unrelated to recent developments.

Puget’s William George said they don’t usually announce changes to their product line, but felt it was necessary in this situation given that they’ve been so candid about the reliability of Samsung SSDs in the past.

We were told that customers using a system equipped with a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB have already been contacted about updating their firmware, and those with problems with the 990 Pro are encouraged to contact so Puget can fix things.

Have you had any issues with the 980 Pro or 990 Pro?