If you’re an owner of the new Samsung 990 Pro SSD, or you’re thinking of buying one, you might want to pay attention to this Neowin story that seems to indicate that these drives have a problem. They die far quicker than they should:
When you buy the fastest flagship SSD on the market, you expect a certain level of reliability and confidence from its performance, but things can and do go wrong sometimes, and customer support is paramount at instilling continued confidence in the brand. This has typically been the case for past Samsung drives, actually, even the non-flagship models have been highly reliable and perform excellently with very few that I have seen needing an RMA.
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.
Within another day or so it had dropped to 98%, by this point I’d not even written 2TB to the drive. Fast forward a couple more days and the drive health was sitting at 95%.
To reiterate, what is being described here is not in the same universe as normal. So the writer of this story sent the drive back to Samsung, only to have the drive returned to him claiming that there was no defect found. Which if this was an isolated incident, you could say that might be the case, even though it’s clearly not. But it’s not an isolated case:
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.
And:
More owners of the 990 Pro have come forward reporting degraded health reporting in another reddit thread, this time in the r/hardware subreddit.
So this isn’t an isolated problem. And once this story got out there, Samsung changed course:
Samsung’s RMA division, Hanaro, have reached out and offered to A) Replace this SSD, and B) Try to replicate the problem. Quite why both of these options were not on the table before the issue became public is a mystery. We still request that readers continue to share their 990 Pro drive health stats and what region of the world they are in so that a better overall picture can be drawn of what appears to be a potentially developing situation.
I would agree with that and go one step further. If you’re looking to put an SSD into your latest PC build, avoiding this drive entirely would be my advice as clearly it has issues that Samsung either hasn’t gotten to the bottom of, or is looking the other way until they’re forced to deal with it. And this is happening after the previous generation drive the 980 Pro had issues as well. Clearly something is wrong over at Samsung as consumers should not be Samsung’s QA department. And until Samsung comes out with a root cause analysis along with detailing how they are going to ensure that stuff like this isn’t going to happen in the future so that consumers can trust their SSDs, I’d be steering clear of all of their SSDs to be safe. After all, it’s your data on those SSDs and your data is vaulable.
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This entry was posted on January 26, 2023 at 9:04 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Samsung. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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#PSA : You Should Avoid Buying Samsung 990 Pro SSDs As They Appear To Die Far Faster Than Normal
If you’re an owner of the new Samsung 990 Pro SSD, or you’re thinking of buying one, you might want to pay attention to this Neowin story that seems to indicate that these drives have a problem. They die far quicker than they should:
When you buy the fastest flagship SSD on the market, you expect a certain level of reliability and confidence from its performance, but things can and do go wrong sometimes, and customer support is paramount at instilling continued confidence in the brand. This has typically been the case for past Samsung drives, actually, even the non-flagship models have been highly reliable and perform excellently with very few that I have seen needing an RMA.
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.
Within another day or so it had dropped to 98%, by this point I’d not even written 2TB to the drive. Fast forward a couple more days and the drive health was sitting at 95%.
To reiterate, what is being described here is not in the same universe as normal. So the writer of this story sent the drive back to Samsung, only to have the drive returned to him claiming that there was no defect found. Which if this was an isolated incident, you could say that might be the case, even though it’s clearly not. But it’s not an isolated case:
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.
And:
More owners of the 990 Pro have come forward reporting degraded health reporting in another reddit thread, this time in the r/hardware subreddit.
So this isn’t an isolated problem. And once this story got out there, Samsung changed course:
Samsung’s RMA division, Hanaro, have reached out and offered to A) Replace this SSD, and B) Try to replicate the problem. Quite why both of these options were not on the table before the issue became public is a mystery. We still request that readers continue to share their 990 Pro drive health stats and what region of the world they are in so that a better overall picture can be drawn of what appears to be a potentially developing situation.
I would agree with that and go one step further. If you’re looking to put an SSD into your latest PC build, avoiding this drive entirely would be my advice as clearly it has issues that Samsung either hasn’t gotten to the bottom of, or is looking the other way until they’re forced to deal with it. And this is happening after the previous generation drive the 980 Pro had issues as well. Clearly something is wrong over at Samsung as consumers should not be Samsung’s QA department. And until Samsung comes out with a root cause analysis along with detailing how they are going to ensure that stuff like this isn’t going to happen in the future so that consumers can trust their SSDs, I’d be steering clear of all of their SSDs to be safe. After all, it’s your data on those SSDs and your data is vaulable.
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This entry was posted on January 26, 2023 at 9:04 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Samsung. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.