Several users are reporting that the condition of one of the best SSDs, the Samsung 990 Pro, is deteriorating at a breakneck pace. The issue seems to affect the entire Samsung 990 Pro lineup, regardless of capacity. Some drives have lost 10% or more health in days or weeks.
Logically, the SSD health is 100% when checked with an SSD utility (such as CrystalDiskInfo) when first unboxed. But the number eventually goes down when you start writing data to the drive. The problem is when that value starts to decrease exponentially and you’re not writing data to the drive.
Samsung 990 Pro’s health declining problem Overclock.net forum (opens in new tab) Over the past month, more user reports have emerged daily. The original poster, who owns a 2 TB drive, wrote just 6,641 GB to the drive and in one month he lost 7%. Another Samsung 990 Pro owner of his reported that in December he had degraded by 12% since he installed the SSD. So far he’s been writing 27.9 TB to the drive and has noticed that his health is dropping by about 1% each week.
One Redditor (opens in new tab)You sent the SSD to Samsung for RMA after seeing the lifespan of your Samsung 990 Pro 2TB shortened by 6% in two weeks. However, the company reportedly returned the same drive claiming no defects were found, and then formatted the drive and restored it to factory settings. Samsung then provides a replacement for his Redditor and attempts to reproduce the issue. The worst case I’ve seen so far comes from a Twitter user. Neil Scofield (opens in new tab), shared a screenshot of the Samsung 990 Pro. Health status is 64% and total host writes are only 2TB.
Not enough. Samsung rates the Samsung 990 Pro at 1,200 TBW (TeraBytes Written). So 1% equals 12TB of written data. A drive health of 93% means that about 84 TB of data had to be written. So for the average user, the drive should be near new, not 96% or 93% healthy.
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In the meantime, it’s unclear if the Samsung 990 Pro actually has a hardware issue that’s causing its rapid health drop, or if the reported health numbers are a software-side error. The software obviously gets its data from SMART health parameters, so the information has to be solid. Additionally, users have confirmed that various software such as Samsung Magician, CrystalDiskInfo, Hard Disk Sentinel, etc. report the same value. That said, I can’t rule out the possibility that it’s the firmware or a reported bug. Strangely, Samsung Magician’s short or extended SMART self-test did not run on the Samsung 990 Pro.
Right now, there aren’t many clues to move on. The only commonality is that the affected SSD is the drive for storing the operating system. So it makes sense that Microsoft Windows is a bad match for the Samsung 990 Pro. Alternatively, a particular batch of drives may be defective.it happened before (opens in new tab).
It was big news in China that many Samsung 980 Pro owners reported their SSDs failing after six months to a year of use due to bad blocks. Other reports indicate that Samsung 970 Evo Plus and OEM drives such as PM9A1 and PM981A are also problematic drives. There have been some reports outside of China, but the problem has not been widespread.
In the previous debacle, users could tell if a drive was affected by monitoring two specific SMART values.Unfortunately this “0E” debacle (opens in new tab), if the entry is non-zero, the user may have a faulty drive. This isn’t the first time the SMART parameter has identified a potentially failing drive. Therefore, this health degradation issue for the Samsung 990 Pro is worth investigating on Samsung’s part.
