Samsung 990 Pro SSDs are apparently failing fast, and nobody knows why
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According to multiple reports, it resembles Samsung’s latest flagship solid-state drive – the Samsung 990Pro (opens in new tab) – is experiencing serious hardware problems.
A report published on Newwin (opens in new tab), which was preceded by the author of the report posting to Reddit about his own experience with the issue, claims that the 990 Pro is losing “drive health” at an alarmingly fast rate. Some users have reported seeing a drop of 10% or more in just a few days.
The Samsung 990 Pro is arguably the best SSD currently on the market (although it will cost you a pretty penny, as this is seriously high-end storage), meaning many avid PC builders will have bought one for their custom rigs when it launched in November 2022 unclear at this time exactly how many SSDs were affected, but judging by Reddit threads, we can conclude that it has affected several users.
Severity varies, but so far the worst instance seems to come from a Twitter user Neil Schofield (opens in new tab), who posted a screenshot of the SSD utility CrystalDisk – a program often used to check disk health – showing that his 990 Pro 2TB was down to 64% after writing just 2006GB of data to the drive. It’s not just the 2TB version either; we can confirm that other abilities are similarly affected.
After reading your article, I thought I should check mine out. The results are terrible! 36% worn out after writing less than 2TB of data? @SamsungUK what’s going on? pic.twitter.com/VdzLoEAarNJanuary 22, 2023
Analysis: why is this such a big deal?
For those not in the know, the “health” of a drive essentially refers to its overall capacity and effectiveness. A new drive should be 100% healthy, while reading and writing data to the drive causes it to degrade over time. This “wear and tear” is normal and expected with SSDs, especially with heavy use.
However, the numbers reported here go well beyond what we would expect from normal SSD degradation; as one redditor pointed out (opens in new tab) in the comments their older 970 Evo 1TB drive was still at 97% health after over 70TB of data transfers.
It’s unclear at this time what exactly is causing the problem and Samsung has not yet commented. As for the original poster who complained and tried to RMA his drive, he got it back with a claim form from Samsung that the problem was non-replicable, though the tech giant’s RMA department has since offered a full replacement now that the story gaining publicity.
It seems that Samsung is not sure either, as the RMA team has requested that the affected drive be returned (again) for further testing. Given that the 990 Pro is supposedly rated for 1,200 TBW (Terabytes of Written), writing 2TB of data should result in a health drop of about 0.17% – not the massive 36% loss Schofield encountered.
Reddit is abuzz with theories, with some users speculating that it might just be a reporting bug generating incorrect values - although Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) notes that users have compared the results of multiple SSD monitoring programs and found the same results, and Samsung’s own Magician software refuses to properly test the drive.
The launch of the 990 Pro last year was actually pushed back from its original launch in October (opens in new tab) for reasons unknown, so it’s possible that manufacturing issues have occurred and the affected drives are from a faulty batch. Some users have also theorized that Windows is to blame, as the only unifying feature of the deteriorating SSDs is that they are all boot drives for the operating system. In any case, if you’re looking for one SSD dealwe recommend that you keep the 990 Pro away until the problem is resolved.