One of Samsung’s best SSDs has a big health problem

3 years ago 1

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Multiple users of Samsung 990 Pro NVMe SSD are recording excessive health deterioration on their drives, Tom’s Hardware reports.

New SSDs start with a health of 100%, a number which drops as you write data to the drive.

Samsung has rated the 990 Pro for 1,200TBW (Terabytes Written), meaning it should take around 12TB of written data before the drive loses 1% of its health.

But some of Samsung’s 990 Pro SSDs show over 10% lower health after only a few days or weeks’ usage, with a much higher rate of degradation than its rating.

The problems first surfaced on the Overclock.net forums in late December 2022, with new user complaints added on a near-daily basis.

The first person complaining found his drive lost 7% health in one month, with just over 6.6TB of data written to his 2TB drive. His drive was only supposed to have lost around 0.5% of its health.

Another recorded a 12% drop after writing 27.9TB of data on his SSD, which he installed in December. The actual decrease in this instance should have been just over 2%.

He calculated that the drive’s health was falling by around 1% weekly. At that pace, it should die in just over two years.

The worst case was reported by Twitter user Neil Schofield, who recorded a 36% health status drop with only 2TB of host writes.

After reading your article, I thought I’d take a look at mine. The results are horrendous! 36% worn out after writing less than 2TB of data? @SamsungUK what is going on? pic.twitter.com/VdzLoEAarN

— Neil Schofield (@neilaschofield) January 22, 2023

The health issues could be caused by either the hardware itself or a bug in the software reporting the values.

But Tom’s Hardware said the latter was less likely, given that multiple drive health checkers — including Samsung Magician, CrystalDiskInfo, and Hard Disk Sentinel — reported the same issues.

One user complaining about the health issue on Reddit returned their drive to Samsung, but the company said it could find nothing wrong with it and performed a factory reset before sending it back to the owner.

Several owners of Samsung’s previous generation 980 Pro in China reported their drives failed within six months to a year’s usage due to bad blocks. However, that issue did not appear to extend to other countries.

If the problems with the 990 Pro are hardware-related, then buyers’ frustration is understandable.

The drive offers among the best performance of any NVMe SSD on the market, with a price tag to match.

In South Africa, the Samsung 990 Pro 1TB currently retails for R3,499 from Evetech, while the 2TB version will set you back R5,699.