Samsung 990 PRO Flagship SSD Has an Endurance Problem, Users Notice Rapid Drive-Health Drops

[btarunr]

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.

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[Ferrum Master]

Great job with making products cheaper only for you on smaller Tech nodes and taking all the margin, yet crippling endurance.

Great job engineers.

 

[Space Lynx]

gg

 

[Outback Bronze]

Ouch

 

[Gungar]

Great job with making products cheaper only for you on smaller Tech nodes and taking all the margin, yet crippling endurance.

Great job engineers.

People still buy Samsung's SSD in 2023?

 

[Prima.Vera]

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.

This is why I am also never buying from Samsung again. They became a callous company with over inflated prices, trying to copy another junk company such as Sony in its practices...

 

[Ferrum Master]

People still buy Samsung's SSD in 2023?

Regarding laptops you often even do not have a choice. Vendors assemble them with anything at hand and you can get various versions.

 

[Chaitanya]

People still buy Samsung's SSD in 2023?

I did purchase their SSD as they are the only ones left with "decent" after sales service here with walk in centers. For other manufacturers its pretty much a gamble depending on if the distributor will stay in business few years down the road.

 

[Crackong]

I avoided Samsung SSD after I had 3x 4TB 870EVO in my NAS failed in 2 weeks time.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Is it possible that Samsung has quietly and unannounced replaced the high quality TLC nand chips with some junk, low quality TLC, or even QLC?

 

[fibre]

People still buy Samsung's SSD in 2023?

Are there better options? I buy Crucial and Samsung (EU).

 

[[XC] Oj101]

Are there better options? I buy Crucial and Samsung (EU).

Kingston KC3000/Renegade? I'd take anything from WD, Crucial, Seagate, Kingston or even... ADATA... before Samsung. They used to have a very legitimate reason to charge more than other vendors for their SSDs, but since almost everyone has caught up in terms of speed and to a large extend reliability, they're a hard pass for me. They're still charging as if they're at least 5x as reliable and 2x as fast as anyone else.

 

[kaktus1907]

And I just ordered 2TB 990 Pro today. I've been very happy with my 500GB 970 Pro MLC drive that I'd wish to get a new Samsung drive.

50TB so far in 3 years 94% health left.

Canceled my order, not gonna risk if it has same problem or not.

Edit: Ordered Kingston KC3000 instead.

 

[las]

People still buy Samsung's SSD in 2023?

Yeah thats why they domiante the market

Most OEM drives are also Samsung tech on our company Thinkpads

Never had issues with Samsung SSDs, and I probably used 100+ (and still uses a few in other machinse) however I curretly use WD in my primary PC

I genereally like Samsung, WD and Crucial when it comes to SSDs

 

[GunShot]

I'm just surprised that it took TPU this long to post this report about another Samsung debacle.

 

[Yraggul666]

First the 870EVO conundrum and now this; way to go, sammy...
As someone above said: i'll take any other SSD brand before i'll buy sammy ever again.
At this rate my trusted pc part brand circle is becoming really REALLY tiny......

 

[zmeul]

I avoided Samsung SSD after I had 3x 4TB 870EVO in my NAS failed in 2 weeks time.

you put consumer grade SSDs in a NAS and you complain they failed

 

[INSTG8R]

I run a 500GB 970 Evo Plus as my Boot drive but I have 2 512GB 850 EVO in RAID 0 that have been going strong now since 2015. I also have a 1TB 870 QVO I keep my MS games and CoDs on for "reasons"
the 2 850s surprise me as they were originally my OS drive and now are just another "faster drive" I store less important games on, I use my 2TB Corsair MP600 Core as my main game drive. It's my only Gen4 and it's no even a full speed model.
But so far I have never had a Samsung fail on me(touch wood) and those 2 850s have been punished for a very long time in RAID 0 with nary a hiccup.

 

[Crackong]

you put consumer grade SSDs in a NAS and you complain they failed

I put comsumer grade SSDs(Samsung, Seagate, Crucial) in NAS / workstations in RAID and only Samsung had this rapid failing issue.

 

[randomUser]

you put consumer grade SSDs in a NAS and you complain they failed

What are you implying?

For all i know, if its a home NAS server, it gets abused much less than a personal desktop. I mean you store info into NAS every now and then and just access it in multiple ways.
On a personal PC people usually install/reinstall multiple games worth of hundreds of gigabytes.
Don't forget the browsing part. It is usally done on personal computer, not the NAS, and browsing is really the SSD killer if you ever looked at how much data browsers write into disk...

 

[sephiroth117]

The 980pro is frankly an amazing SSD, purchased one for the PS5 during sales, 2TB was quite cheap !

I have a Kingston renegade fury in my new PC now, I just think that the 990 pro, on paper, is really good, especially the thermal and watt efficiency but those issues need to be fixed asap, be it firmware or hardware revision, and customers should be taken seriously, no support engineer should accept those health drop figures !

Let's see how it fares whilst I'd obviously not purchase a 990 pro right now, I'd give Samsung 1-2 weeks to sort that out before really judging them.

 

[PerfectWave]

my sabrent nvme 1tb on crystal info say 96% health for only 1917gb written. Sabrent utility say 100% health LUL...

 

[john_]

I have a TeamGroup 1TB GX2 that seems to be having problems with trimm. Speed drops to 5MB/sec in some parts of the drive. Contacted TeamGroup, send them a number of benchmarks, got some replies from them, including one saying that....

After confirming with our engineers, basically, this is a product feature of GX2 itself.
If you are still unacceptable to this situation, please follow the steps below to provide relevant information for subsequent process operations.

in the end because of also a busy period for me with my job and stuff, just gone and bought a Kioxia to replace it.

Some companies aren't really helpful when someone finds a problem with their products. And this case proves that even Samsung that asks from the consumer to pay a premium, isn't better either.

 

[BorisDG]

I was going to order one... thank god I saw this story.

 

[Verpal]

I have a TeamGroup 1TB GX2 that seems to be having problems with trimm. Speed drops to 5MB/sec in some parts of the drive. Contacted TeamGroup, send them a number of benchmarks, got some replies from them, including one saying that....

in the end because of also a busy period for me with my job and stuff, just gone and bought a Kioxia to replace it.

Some companies aren't really helpful when someone finds a problem with their products. And this case proves that even Samsung that asks from the consumer to pay a premium, isn't better either.

Some ultra cheap controller paired with DRAMLESS design, sometime with QLC too just to add insult to injury, and you get a SSD on wheelchair.