Louis Rossmann verklagt Samsung, nachdem das Unternehmen 330 US-Dollar Rückerstattung für defekte SSDs angeboten hat, während die Laufwerke bei Amazon für 949 US-Dollar verkauft wurden – Streit um 4 TB 990 Pro SSD wird vor Gericht geführt
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/louis-rossman-threatens-to-take-samsung-to-court-over-dead-4tb-990-pro-ssd-after-ssd-maker-failed-to-replace-the-drive-under-warranty
44 Kommentare
I hope he wins!
I love this dude.
Seems fairly open and shut with the wording in the warranty about the present market value.
They (temporarily) screwed themselves under the presumption that the market price for hardware decreases with time!
one of those rare times when ‚do you have any idea who I am‘ would be appropriate
It’s not like they have to buy the chips and take a loss. Samsung literally produces the chips on the SSD themselves. They need to take the „loss“ that they can’t sell some 4TB to Big AI and honor the warranty.
they/Samsung will probably opt to spend way more money on lawyers than give into him and send a message others can do the same. But i watched his video and it seems a judge would respect all the work Rossman has done to prove his case.
Poor bastards are really unlucky to try and pull this on Louis of all the people they could have picked. Imagine if some clueless person accepted the RMA’d SSD and couldn’t understand why its slower than an HDD
> Rossman then threatened to take the SSD manufacturer to court in Austin, Texas, if a new 4TB 990 Pro is not sent to him within 60 days. Samsung ultimately replied and offered him a cash refund of $330, the original price of the drive, citing a lack of stock to replace the drive. Rossman found the drive in plentiful supply on Samsung’s own Amazon store for $949, meaning he would have to pay three times the amount for a replacement drive.
Louis doesn’t understand, the chaebol desperately needs that extra $619.
From the article:
„The wording of Samsung’s warranty seems to support this conclusion:
„{…}during the limited warranty period, and subject to the conditions and exceptions stated in this Agreement, Samsung will, at its option, either: (1) repair or replace the Product with new or refurbished Product of equal or greater capacity and functionality; or (2) refund the then current market value of the Product at the time the warranty claim is made to Samsung if Samsung is unable to repair or replace the Product.““
Seems to me that Rossmann has some pretty firm ground to stand on. He wins either way you dice Samsung’s warranty language. Either the court 1) orders a replacement due the „if Samsung is unable to repair or replace the product,“ as there is stock publicly available; or 2) orders Samsung to „refund the then current market value of the product at the time the warranty claim is made,“ which would be the $900+ valuation of today, not what Rossman paid when he purchased the drive.
In my opinion, the Takeaway here is that these big companies don’t really give a flying fuck about the customers until one with a lot of influence comes up and speaks up then everybody starts shaking in their boots
A Win for Ross is a win for customers. Fk these greedy corpos!
Why would such a big company nickel and dime the customer so badly? Like how many drives could possibly be returned during warranty periods? Wouldn’t the negative press be a worse outcome than the couple hundred thousand that these returns could cost???
I miss the days when $300 to $400 got you a decent 4TB SSD. This is strong arm robbery though.
I emailed him a couple of years ago about IFIXIT sending faulty batteries over and over again to me for iPhones and Macbook Pros, and they said there’s no way. I’m not sure if it was him responding, but the advice he provides is usually wrong, and based on feelings.
*“In no event will Samsung’s liability exceed the amount paid by you for the product.“*
If a judge decides that this overarching liability limitation supersedes the „current market value“ clause, the court may rule that Samsung fulfilled its legal obligation by offering the original $330 back.
I have almost the exact same problem but with Western Digital Gold 16TB Drive. Sold in October last year, errors after 2 weeks. Send it back. Didn’t want to believe it was a faulty drive, took them 3 months to analyse. Than they stated sorry we have no more stock for the coming years and we don’t produce these anymore, we can refund you the money, but if I want to buy a new one, costs me 50% more.
Buried lede: the two sides can’t even agree if the SSD is actually broken. I feel like there could be a 3rd party who wants to better investigate what’s really going wrong here, why it works for Samsung and not Rossman.
I bet the terms of the user agreement allow only for arbitration and not court.
I’m going to break with the meta here and say that’s it’s pretty fair for a company to have a cause saying their liability is limited to the cost of the item. If you applied this to a smaller company rather than a mega corp you are biased against it’d be pretty obvious that Obligating a company to pay out more than they were paid in the first place is unreasonable
Crucial replaced 2 sticks of laptop DDR2 with new ones. It was obsolete for years and no longer sold. I didn’t even give them proof of purchase.
They were like, „bad… really?.. well here’s some new ones“
Still working today.
Too bad they left the consumer game.
We bought more than a dozen hard drives from Amazon last year. Most were Seagate. When two of them failed, I contacted Seagate for a warranty replacement. They claimed the drives were only permitted for sale in Europe. I was told to contact the seller for a refund. Amazon verified that they were for sale in the USA (Amazon is an authorized reseller of Seagate hard drives and has an official Seagate web store on its website). I sent a strongly worded legal notice to Seagate stating that either their authorized reseller was advertising this drive as having a warranty and was committing fraud, they would be held accountable for authorizing the reseller to sell it to me, or they would honor the warranty. They agreed to honor the warranty. What a crazy world it is out there right now.
It’s not quite the same thing, but I had a similar problem when someone smashed into my car and it should have been totaled. However the insurance company paid an enormous amount of money to repair everything. It was never the same and creaked and just was never right. When I tried to trade it in I was being offered only a fraction of what it had been worth. So I filed a diminution of value claim and received a check for the difference.
I was swapping out several of our gaming computers so I had bought 10 1TB SSDs from Samsung a few years ago, so each machine got a couple of those besides the M2.
Within a year 7 of them failed. I don’t know what happened to Samsung but their quality didn’t decline, it fell off a cliff.
White I hope this changes, there is zero chance Samsung will lose money when the investors demand he not do so. They could spend hundreds of millions of dollars, bury him, and then move on. Because guess what? The consumer can no longer boycott to get anything done. Unless a nation imposes criminal rules on the activity, which, there is zero incentive to do, this will continue and accelerate as long as money is to be made.
I am so glad I got my 4TB SSD before the price hikes cause jfc $1000 for an SSD??????
The same Samsung 870 EVO 2TB SSD that I bought in fall of 2024 for $170 is now $499 at Amazon.
Insanity
Is he actually? or is this just another „honey lawsuit“ like what he and his partner did last time. file initial paperwork and get lots of clicks but backout and drop it before actual court stuff happens.
I have a similar issue, but in my case I’ve been waiting 2 years for Amazon to post me my SSD. I have to keep refusing a refund because it obviously won’t cover buying it again right now.
I am in the exact same situation with Amazon and seagate ! My god ! Exact same. 24 TB drive. Seagate has offered to replace if I pay shipping at least.
Hot take I know, but I think when something is warrantied pricing factors shouldn’t be taken into account. A full replacement should be offered first and foremost.
„But then they’ll lose money!“ yeah well they shouldn’t be putting defective products on the market. „But defects can happen to anything and the rates are low!“ yeah well if the rates are low, they can afford such a rare case.
He is quite good at this type of stuff too.
He’s such a little fireball but I fucking get it… I’d be mad too. These kind of underhanded tricks are probably pulled on their average customer regularly with varying degrees of success, but Louis has the time and energy and inclination to fight back, and I love that.
And this is how you demolish your brand name…I hope Ross wins!
Samsung is a company with an horrendous customer care culture, and everyone should try to stay away from it.
That particular drive (though the NVMe variant) for me was garbage on Home Assistant, I experienced frequent lockups and it never ran for longer than two weeks without one. I replaced it with a Western Digital Black and that has been rock solid.
Haven’t looked into the full details yet but if the numbers in the headline are accurate this is a pretty straightforward case of a company offering a fraction of current market value as a settlement and hoping the customer just takes it. Rossmann is probably the worst person Samsung could have picked this fight with given that he has built an entire audience around exactly this kind of repair and consumer rights stuff. This is going to get way more attention than a quiet out of court settlement would have.
Pretty much this exact situation is why I abandoned Samsung as a provider for anything I manage. I managed to navigate above the „reading a script“ tier of customer service and got in actual (email) writing that their refund/warranty policies are never honored and unenforceable.
It sucks for them since I was sourcing not just internal computer hardware but break-room appliances and common area displays exclusively under their brand for over a decade.
If anyone’s curious, at least from the display and appliance side of things, LG seems like it stepped in and competes pretty directly with Samsung. For internal gear (solid state drives, specifically) I ended up favoring different manufacturers for different needs but gravitate towards PNY for general productivity and WD/Sandisk for performance.
It was not SSD for me, but GTX Titan X(Maxwell) from EVGA. It was burnt and I only had like 3 months of guaranteed left.
I e-mailed EVGA asked them how much it will costs for repair and they told me to just send it in, I even got the return package from them within 5 days after e-mailed.
They fixed GPU within 2 weeks and I got it back as good as new, FOR FREE!
I will never ever forget EVGA.
Didn’t Corsair get in hot water a few months ago, for that guy who sent the 2-stick RAM kit back, and they didn’t have that exact kit, so they offered a refund in the amount he paid and not the actual market value, that day? I seem to remember Corsair answering they were under no obligation to upgrade his kit or pay him more than he paid for that kit, and getting away with it. I think it was talked about on Hardware Unboxed YT channel….
I’m so confused why samsung isn’t just replacing with the same drive instead of offering a cash compensation.
Louis is the GOAT,
Hey, it’s that guy with that black cat named Clinton.
I really like Louis. He tries to advocate for „the little guy“ and points out messed up stuff like this.
Go Louis! 👏
I got my 4TB for about $350. Trump tariffs have it at 8 or 9 hundred. These idiots think Trump is winning and he is off the backs of the American people. Some Americans are so stupid!
The same Samsung that sold me a VR headset in Canada, from a Canadian store, in CAD that then told me they wont honor the warranty because it wasn’t bought in America? That Samsung?