Hot question: Solid-state drives can only record a limited amount of data during their lifetime, which is determined by the “health status” of each disk. There have been an alarming number of recent reports that the usually vaunted Samsung 990 Pro solid-state drive is losing performance too quickly, and Samsung is in no hurry to solve them.
Users report a faster-than-usual deterioration in the performance of Samsung 990 Pro solid-state drives during the month. No one seems to have identified the cause that affects all disk sizes. Samsung has only recently launched an investigation into this.
Multiple users on Reddit and overclock.net data storage utilities are said to report alarmingly low health rates of their 990 Pro and shockingly large volumes of recorded data after just a few weeks of use. Many utilities, such as CrystalDiscInfo and Samsung Magician software, report that the same statistics are moving more rapidly.
Samsung’s warranty covers the 990 Pro for up to five years or 600 terabytes of recording (TBW) for the 1 TB model and 1200 TBW for the 2 TB model, starting with 100 percent operability during initial installation. Magician and CrystalDiscInfo informed one user that only 93 percent of health remained on their 2TB SSD, despite the fact that they recorded only about 7 TB, which should leave them with more than 99 percent of health. Others report similar health assessments, despite having written even less.
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
At least one user disk loses about one percent per week, which can lead to SSD failure for 18 months. The other lost three percent in one day. One unpleasant case on Twitter shows a screen of CrystalDiscInfo results with 64 percent remaining after recording just 2 TB (above).
Robbie Khan from Neowin ran into a problem and sent his SSD to Samsung, hoping that technicians would be able to identify the root cause. Samsung returned the disk after a factory reset, which was supposed to restore its performance to 100 percent, but it only had 94 percent. Samsung offered to replace the SSD and take Kahn to try to reproduce the problem.
It is unclear if the problem is related to software or hardware. There may be a glitch in how solid-state drives report their values for health checks. The only similarity between the affected disks is that they are all Windows OS disks, so the problem may also be an operating system error. I hope Samsung will make an official public statement soon.
