There may be a problem with Samsung’s new 990 PRO SSDs. According to various owners who have shared their experiences online, the drive may suffer from rapid health degradation, with one claiming that they lost 2% health in a week after just 1.8 TB of writes, while another has suggested that the SSD could lose as much as 36% of its health after less than 2 TB of writes. An editor with Neowin who received a bad 990 PRO is claiming that Samsung is refusing to acknowledge and replace the affected SSDs.
From a Neowin report:
Colour me with sadness when within just a couple of days of buying the 990 Pro 2TB, I noticed that the drive health according to SMART data from both Samsung Magician and third party tools had dropped to 99%. For the record I have other Samsung SSDs with over 40TB written and still at 99% health 1.5 years later, so I knew this was not normal.
Around the same time I posted to OcUK and reddit to see if others had seen the same problem, as it turns out, they had, and there is a lengthy thread over at Overclock.net about it. Once my drive had dropped to 94% I filed the RMA with Samsung/Hanaro.
A few days later a shipment was on its way to me from Samsung/Hanaro. I had to email Hanaro to get info on what was found only to be told that the same drive is on its way back because no defect was found.
Samsung announced the 990 PRO, a high-performance PCIe Gen 4 SSD optimized for gaming and creative applications, in August 2022. The SSD is advertised as having sequential read/write speeds of up to 7,450/6,900 MB/s and an endurance rating of up to 1,200 TB written. A 2 TB version with heatsink is available for $309.99.
After reading your article, I thought I'd take a look at mine. The results are horrendous! 36% worn out after writing less than 2TB of data? @SamsungUK what is going on? pic.twitter.com/VdzLoEAarN
— Neil Schofield (@neilaschofield) January 22, 2023