A scorching potato: Stable-state drives can solely write a restricted quantity of knowledge all through their lifespans, signified by every drive’s “well being.” A worrying variety of latest experiences have emerged of Samsung’s usually lauded 990 Professional SSD dropping well being far too rapidly, and Samsung has been sluggish to handle them.
Customers have reported faster-than-normal well being degradation in Samsung 990 Professional SSDs for a few month. Nobody appears to have decided the trigger, which impacts all drive sizes. Samsung solely just lately opened an investigation into the matter.
A number of customers on Reddit and overclock.net say that storage utility applications are reporting alarmingly low well being numbers for his or her 990 Execs and shockingly excessive quantities of written knowledge after just a few weeks of use. A number of utilities like CrystalDiscInfo and Samsung’s Magician software program report the identical stats shifting extra precipitously.
Samsung’s guarantee covers the 990 Professional for as much as 5 years or 600 terabytes written (TBW) for the 1TB mannequin and 1,200 TBW for the 2TB mannequin, beginning at 100% well being upon preliminary set up. Magician and CrystalDiscInfo informed one person their 2TB SSD had solely 93 p.c well being left regardless of having written solely about 7TB, which ought to go away them with over 99 p.c well being. Others report comparable well being rankings regardless of having written even much less.
After studying your article, I believed I might check out mine. The outcomes are horrendous! 36% worn out after writing lower than 2TB of knowledge? @SamsungUK what’s going on? pic.twitter.com/VdzLoEAarN
— Neil Schofield (@neilaschofield) January 22, 2023
No less than one person’s drive loses about one p.c per week, which might kill the SSD inside 18 months. One other misplaced three p.c in in the future. One nasty occasion on Twitter reveals a CrystalDiscInfo outcomes display with 64 p.c remaining after solely 2TB of writes (above).
Neowin’s Robbie Khan encountered the difficulty and despatched his SSD to Samsung, hoping techs might uncover the foundation trigger. Samsung returned the drive after a manufacturing facility reset, which ought to have restored its well being to 100%, but it surely had solely 94 p.c. Samsung provided to exchange the SSD and take Kahn’s to try to replicate the difficulty.
It is unclear if the issue stems from software program or {hardware}. There could possibly be a glitch in how the SSDs report their values to well being checks. The one commonality between the affected drives is that they’re all Home windows OS drives, so the issue is also an working system bug. Hopefully, Samsung will ship an official public assertion quickly.
