Tuesday, January 24th 2023
Samsung 990 PRO Flagship SSD Has an Endurance Problem, Users Notice Rapid Drive-Health Drops
Samsung 990 PRO is the company's flagship client SSD, which is among the fastest Gen 4 NVMe SSDs you can buy. It also commands a very high price premium, with the 1 TB variant priced at $170, and the 2 TB variant at $290. When you're buying in this segment, you expect the highest endurance figures for your SSD. Client SSD endurance figures are already on the rise, as NAND flash technology evolves. Neowin noticed that their 990 PRO isn't meeting this vital expectation, and with a little digging, found that there are others with this problem, and they didn't just get a bad drive.
Apparently, the "drive health" reading in Samsung Magician—the utility software for Samsung SSDs—drops rather rapidly for the 990 PRO. After a clean software installation on a new drive, Neowin observed that their drive's health reading was already at 99% (something very unexpected for a new drive); and what's worse was that even with regular use of the drive in the following days, the drive health would drop by 1 percentage point every day. Drive health is interchangeable with endurance, as it indicates the number of program-erase (PE) cycles left on the NAND flash memory before regions of the drive's user-area become unwritable.
Such a rapid drop in endurance used to be a problem in the very first generations of client SSDs some 15 years ago, but it's highly unusual for a flagship product like the Samsung 990 PRO. This user on Twitter claims that their drive health dropped down to 64% at just 2 TB of total bytes written—something you don't expect even entry-level SSDs to end up with. Neowin's initial RMA request was rejected (the drive returned) as the company found "no defect" with it, but once it realized that it was dealing with the press, it quickly reached out to replace the drive and try to reproduce the issue.
Source:
Neowin
Apparently, the "drive health" reading in Samsung Magician—the utility software for Samsung SSDs—drops rather rapidly for the 990 PRO. After a clean software installation on a new drive, Neowin observed that their drive's health reading was already at 99% (something very unexpected for a new drive); and what's worse was that even with regular use of the drive in the following days, the drive health would drop by 1 percentage point every day. Drive health is interchangeable with endurance, as it indicates the number of program-erase (PE) cycles left on the NAND flash memory before regions of the drive's user-area become unwritable.
80 Comments on Samsung 990 PRO Flagship SSD Has an Endurance Problem, Users Notice Rapid Drive-Health Drops
If you're samsung/... they would prefer you stop looking like the majority of buyers and just wait for it to die a natural death :laugh:
I had and still have some Samsung PM9A1's. It's essentially an OEM version of 980 Pro without the copper heatspreader. When Gen4 drives came out it was the cheapest (but still expensive costing ~350 for 2TB). That is why i bought 3 of them. One for OS. One for games and one for data. Got rid of of 3 SATA drives and 6 cables thanks to that.
But soon after the rated performance dropped. It was supposed to be around 5000/5000 but dropped to 1400/3000.
Nothing i did fixed it. And later it started spitting out errors. Specifically Media Errors in SMART data. This resulted in corrupted files on the drive.
Eventually i managed to find a command line utility to upgrade the firmware (OEM drives cant be updated trough Magician). But it was too late for one of the drives.
It went into read only mode and soon after did not display anything but was still visible in BIOS and device manager.
It was the one where i had games. So not a big loss.
After the firmware update the media error count stopped going up on the two remaining drives and performance is restored.
But the whole experience has not left a good impression. I mean i knew what i was getting into buying an OEM drive but these errors and drop in performance was not what i expected from Samsung.
Still waiting for RMA on the failed drive. Been waiting since November last year.
My next drive will NOT be Samsung.
This issue here with endurance problems is a shame.
Some stats from my two Samsung drives:
512GB PM9A1: 52TB written. 92% life remaining.
2TB PM9A1: 11TB written. 100% life remaining.
But the initial impression was the same. It dropped 1-2% on the 512GB by just benchmarking and installing the OS.
Anyway for me TeamGroup is a no go and I bet Samsung will lose some customers with their reply in this case. But in the end companies probably lose less by losing some customers to the next one than having to fulfill those RMAs. Because in the end it's a circle.
Customer A is angry with company X, decides to buy only products of company Y
Customer B is angry with company Y, decides to buy only products of company Z
Customer C is angry with company Z, decides to buy only products of company V
Customer D is angry with company V, decides to buy only products of company X
It's a circle.
PS. About Samsung. Let's not forget their firmware problems with 830 EVO also.
Imagine the poor SOBs who need to claim warranty. Samsung will put them through hell before they honor a warranty.
They all had bad sector error around the same time, then all died within 2 weeks.
Thankfully,
Warranty service replaced them with new drives and I simply restored everything from a backup.
We'll see.
Since the failure only breaches the primary RAID, drive replacement + restore from the secondary RAID is all it needed.
Downtime is about 2 days
Thank god I did all the preparation.
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB 500.1 GB
Windows 10
43TB WRITES
95% GOOD
Is that good?