Samsung 990 Pro SSDs Report Rapid Health Degradation

[silversurfer]

Content source

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-health-dropping-fast

Multiple users have reported that the health of the Samsung 990 Pro, one of the best SSDs, is deteriorating at a breakneck pace. The problem seems to affect the entire Samsung 990 Pro lineup regardless of the capacity, with some drives showing over 10% less health in a matter of days or weeks.

Logically, the health of an SSD is at 100% if you check it with an SSD utility, such as CrystalDiskInfo, when you first take it out of the box. But, eventually, the number goes down when you start writing data to the drive. The problem is when that value starts decreasing exponentially, and you haven't been writing any data to the drive.

The Samsung 990 Pro health degradation issue started brewing on the Overclock.net forums (opens in new tab) last month, and more user reports have been emerging every day. The original poster, which owns the 2TB drive, lost 7% in one month with just 6,641GB written to the drive. Another Samsung 990 Pro owner reported a 12% deterioration since he installed his SSD in December. So far, he has written 27.9TB to the drive and noticed the health falling around 1% every week.

One Redditor (opens in new tab), who saw his Samsung 990 Pro 2TB lifespan go down 6% in two weeks, sent his SSD to Samsung for RMA. However, the company reportedly returned the same drive claiming that it didn't find any defects, and it formatted the drive and restored it to factory settings. Subsequently, Samsung has offered the Redditor a replacement and will try to replicate the problem. The worst case we've seen so far comes from Twitter user Neil Schofield (opens in new tab), who shared a screenshot of his Samsung 990 Pro with a 64% health status and only 2TB of total host writes.

Samsung 990 Pro SSDs Report Rapid Health Degradation

Some drives lost 10% of health in just a few weeks.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[plat]

Hmmm. This follows closely what happened to the 980 Pro when it first came on the market--although with that, there was a flaw in the cache capability and read/write speeds deteriorated rapidly after 2 weeks. I got one right at the debut and it was flashed one too many times (firmware) before it became corrupt and unusable. Now, almost 2 yrs. later, the replacement is stable at around 3400 mb/s. Health is excellent.

Many experienced enthusiasts say to wait maybe 6 months or more after new tech debuts. But some just can't. I couldn't.

 

[plat]

Someone's anecdotal experience with the 990 Pro. Not good at all.

Spoiler

 

[plat]

Samsung lost a long-time build partner due to this.

Spoiler

 

[silversurfer]

Samsung has released a firmware update for its newest 990 Pro SSDs today. While the company didn't provide official release notes, Tom's Hardware reports that the update is likely intended to fix an issue that caused the drives to report that they were wearing out and failing at an accelerated rate.

Samsung 990 Pro SSD firmware update should halt—but not reverse—rapid wear-out

Samsung's SSD reliability has been a selling point up until recently.

arstechnica.com