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.
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