According to multiple reports, it looks like Samsung’s latest solid state drive – and it is Samsung 990 Pro (Opens in a new tab) It has some serious hardware issues.
A report was published on Newen (Opens in a new tab), preceded by the author of the report who posted on Reddit about his own experience with the issue, claims that the 990 Pro is losing ‘driving health’ at an alarmingly fast rate. Some users have reported seeing a 10% decrease in total health or more in just a matter of days.
The Samsung 990 Pro might be it better ssd on the market right now (although it’ll cost you a pretty penny, since that’s seriously high-quality storage), which means a lot of enthusiastic PC builders will be buying one for their custom platforms when it launches in November 2022. It’s unclear at exactly what point. The number of SSDs affected, but referring to the Reddit threads we can conclude that it affected many users.
Severity varies, but the worst case so far appears to be from a Twitter user Neil Schofield (Opens in a new tab), who posted a screenshot from CrystalDisk’s SSD utility program—a commonly used drive-verification program—showing that the 990 Pro’s 2TB dropped to just 64% after writing just 2006GB of data to the drive. It’s not just the 2TB version; We can confirm that other capabilities are similarly affected.
After reading your article, I thought I’d take a look at mine. The results are shocking! 36% obsolete after writing less than 2TB of data? SamsungUK What’s going on? pic.twitter.com/VdzLoEAarNJanuary 22, 2023
Analysis: Why is this a big deal?
For those who aren’t in the know, a drive’s “health” basically refers to its overall capacity and efficiency. The new drive must have 100% health, while reading and writing data to the drive will degrade it over time. This “wear and tear” is normal and expected for SSDs, especially those that see heavy use.
However, the numbers cited here far exceed what we would expect to see from the normal degradation of SSDs. As one editor noted (Opens in a new tab) In the comments, their older 970 Evo 1TB drive was still 97% healthy after over 70TB of data transfers.
It is now not clear what exactly caused the problem, and Samsung has not yet commented. Worryingly, the original poster who complained and attempted an RMA was returned with a Samsung claim form that the problem was non-replicable, though the tech giant’s RMA division has since offered a full replacement now that the story has gained prominence. .
It seems Samsung isn’t sure either, as the RMA team requested that the affected drive be returned (again) for further testing. Given that the 990 Pro is supposed to be rated for 1,200TB (terabytes written), writing 2TB of data should result in a health drop of 0.17% — not the whopping 36% loss Schofield experienced.
Reddit is full of theories, with some users speculating that it could just be a reporting error that produces incorrect values - although tom devices (Opens in a new tab) Notes Users compare results from several SSD monitoring programs and find the same, Samsung’s Magician refuses to properly test the drive.
The 990 Pro launched last year, in fact It retracted from its original launch in October (Opens in a new tab) For undisclosed reasons, so it’s possible that manufacturing issues arose and the affected drives came from a defective batch. Some users have also assumed that Windows is to blame, since the only unifying feature among insulting SSDs is that they are all operating system boot drives. Anyway, if you are looking for a SSD dealWe advise you to stay away from the 990 Pro until the issue is resolved.