Samsung has released a firmware update for its 990 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs to address the anomalies that users have been experiencing with these premium drives, namely, rapid health degradation, some reports of which have suggested major losses despite a relatively minimal number of writes. According to a new post from Samsung moderator DavidB, the new firmware is now available through the Samsung Magician software, although there still seems to lingering debate as to whether the affected SSDs actually degraded or if they were simply reporting inaccurate data based on buggy firmware. Samsung seems to have only gone so far as to confirm that the update does not reset S.M.A.R.T. values to factory defaults.
From a Samsung forum post:
[Edit: Wording adapted at Samsung’s request]
Hello everyone,
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.
(SMART values ​​are not restored to factory settings after firmware update. Actual SMART values ​​of each SSD vary depending on user environment and usage conditions).
The update can be downloaded from Samsung Magician or here:
https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/
You can find our warranty conditions for the 990 PRO SSD at https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/warranty/.