Samsung 990 Pro users report rapid loss of health
Hot potato: SSDs can only write a limited amount of data during their lifetime, which is determined by the “health” of each drive. There have been an alarming number of recent reports that the normally vaunted Samsung 990 Pro SSD is failing too quickly, and Samsung has been slow to address them.
Users have been reporting faster-than-usual performance degradation of Samsung 990 Pro SSDs over the course of a month. No one seems to have identified a cause that affects all disk sizes. Samsung has only recently launched an investigation into this matter.
Multiple users on Reddit and overclock no storage utilities are said to be reporting alarmingly low health numbers on their 990 Pro and a shockingly large amount of data written after only a few weeks of use. Many utilities such as CrystalDiscInfo and Samsung Magician software report that the same statistics move more rapidly.
samsung warranty lids 990 Pro for up to five years or 600 terabytes of write (TBW) for the 1 TB model and 1200 TBW for the 2 TB model, starting at 100 percent uptime on initial installation. Magician and CrystalDiscInfo reported to one user that their 2TB SSD had only 93 percent health left, despite having only written about 7TB, which should leave them at over 99 percent health. Others report similar health scores despite writing even less.
After reading your article, I decided to take a look at mine. The results are terrible! 36% worn out after writing less than 2 TB of data? @SamsungUK what’s happening? pic.twitter.com/VdzLoEAarN
— Neil Schofield (@neilaschofield) January 22, 2023
At least one user drive loses about one percent per week, which could cause an SSD to fail within 18 months. Another lost three percent in one day. One nasty case on Twitter shows the results screen of CrystalDiscInfo with 64 percent left after writing just 2TB (above).
Robbie Khan of Neowin faced problem and sent my SSD to Samsung, hoping that the technicians could uncover the root cause. Samsung returned the drive after a factory reset that should have restored it to 100 percent health, but it only had 94 percent. Samsung suggested replacing the SSD and getting Kahn to try and reproduce the problem.
It is not clear if the issue is software or hardware related. There may be a glitch in how SSDs report their values to health checks. The only similarity between the affected drives is that they are all Windows OS drives, so the issue could also be an operating system bug. Hopefully Samsung will make an official public announcement soon.
