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According to various reports, it appears that Samsung’s latest flagship solid-state drive – the Samsung 990 Pro (opens in a new tab) – You are experiencing some serious hardware problems.
A report published in neowin (opens in a new tab), who was preceded by the author of the report posted to Reddit about his own experience with the problem, claims that the 990 Pro is losing “driving health” at an alarmingly fast rate. Some users have reported seeing 10% drops in total health or more in a matter of days.
The Samsung 990 Pro is perhaps the best ssd on the market right now (although it will cost you a pretty penny, as this is high-end storage), which means many keen PC builders will have bought one for their custom rigs when it launches in November 2022. unclear at this point exactly how many SSDs are affected, but following the Reddit threads we can conclude that it has affected multiple users.
The severity varies, but so far the worst case seems to be from the Twitter user. Neil Schofield (opens in a new tab), who posted a screenshot of SSD CrystalDisk utility software, a program commonly used to check drive health, showing his 990 Pro 2TB dropped to just 64% after writing just 2006GB of data to the drive . It’s not just the 2TB version either; 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 horrendous! 36% exhausted after writing less than 2TB of data? @SamsungUK what’s going on? pic.twitter.com/VdzLoEAarNJanuary 22, 2023
Analysis: why is it such a big problem?
For those who don’t know, a unit’s ‘health’ essentially refers to its overall capability and effectiveness. A new drive should be at 100% health, while reading and writing data to the drive will cause it to degrade over time. This ‘wear and tear’ is normal and expected for SSDs, especially those that get a lot of use.
However, the figures reported here go well beyond what we would expect to see from normal SSD degradation; as one redditor pointed out (opens in a new tab) in the comments, his old 1TB 970 Evo drive was still 97% healthy after over 70TB of data transfers.
It’s unclear at this point exactly what’s causing the problem, and Samsung has yet to comment. Worryingly, the original poster who complained and tried to RMA their unit was sent back with a claim form from Samsung that the problem was not replicable, though the tech giant’s RMA department has offered a full replacement now that the story is out. gaining publicity. .
It seems Samsung isn’t sure either, as the RMA team requested that the affected unit be returned (again) for further testing. Considering the 990 Pro is supposedly rated at 1200 TBW (Terabytes Written), writing 2TB of data should result in a health drop of around 0.17%, not the whopping 36% loss Schofield experienced. .
Reddit is full of theories, and some users are speculating that it could simply be a reporting bug generating incorrect values, though as Tom’s Hardware (opens in a new tab) notes, users compared the results of various 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 delayed from its original release in October (opens in a new tab) for undisclosed reasons, so it is possible that manufacturing issues arose and the affected units came from a defective batch. Some users have also theorized that Windows is to blame, as the only unifying feature among the degrading SSDs is that they are all bootable drives for the operating system. In any case, if you are looking for a SSD offerwe advise you to stay away from the 990 Pro until the issue is resolved.
