News Samsung 990 Pro SSDs Report Rapid Health Degradation

[Admin]

User feedback from the Internet claims that their Samsung NVMe SSDs' health is dropping unusually fast.

Samsung 990 Pro SSDs Report Rapid Health Degradation : Read more

 

[RichardtST]

Yeah. I've gotten bitten by the Samsung drives too. 980 Pro, I believe. Died in a couple days. I simply don't buy Samsung any more. I paid extra for the name, to not have to worry about it. And then it made me worry. Bzzzt. Yer out.

 

[DavidLejdar]

2TB one here in a Gen5 M.2 slot (with an AM5 MB heatsink), and CrystalDiskInfo is saying 100%. Using it for a bit more than a month, with 2,737 GB written. Temp is currently at 31 °C. I don't have the OS nor browser on it though.

And for the drive with the OS, Kingston SNV2S1000G (1TB), in use for 3 months with 3,994 GB written, it is also saying 100%. Temp 33 °C.

Perhaps I am just kind of lucky in such regard, but no complaint here (so far).

 

[TechieTwo]

Yeah. I've gotten bitten by the Samsung drives too. 980 Pro, I believe. Died in a couple days. I simply don't buy Samsung any more. I paid extra for the name, to not have to worry about it. And then it made me worry. Bzzzt. Yer out.

I have been using Samsung SSDs for years and IME I've never had an issue so I'd offer that any issues may be model or batch specific more so than Samsung selling unreliable drives. Samsung would certainly not be alone in having SSD issues as some companies have had significant reliability issues since SSDs were introduced.

 

[TexasRattleSnake]

Wow! I just checked my own drive after reading this and the health is down to 76%! Thanks for reporting this..

 

[PiranhaTech]

I have a Samsung 970 EVO drive that got a bad block and Windows write-protected it. It's replaced

However, my reasoning was that I was using PrimoCache on a small partition on the drive, which might have worn it out quickly.

No idea if that was an effect. PrimoCache did give me a significant perf boost from my magnetic drive, but I'll have to change plans if it can kill an SSD. Planning on getting a dedicated $20 SSD for this later on a PCIe adapter, but that's another subject.

 

[evdjj3j]

My Intel 660p will be 5 years old this year and is at 96%.

 

[pointa2b]

I'm right around the corner from a major PC upgrade, this news couldn't have came at a better time since the 990 was my choice for primary drive. What are some solid alternative brands? My main priorities are performance and endurance (or at least much better than this).

 

[AvidSurvivalist]

I have a Gigabyte Aourus Gen4 7000s 1TB just over a year old and with a tad over 12 TBW, it reports 3% life remaining. 😐

 

[USAFRet]

All my Samsung drives, from the 2014 era 840 EVOs, to the 1 year old 980 Pro...all report 98% minimum life left.

 

[razor512]

Their excuse for not further addressing the issue seems like an attempt to avoid having to address issues with low binned NAND that is being pushed to its limits by the controller.

A controller with good NAND management will have very reliable ways to monitor the NAND and measure the health before uncorrectable errors happen. Aside from that correctable errors are common with all flash storage, as well as disk based storage. The issue is every company has their own secret sauce for NAND management, wear leveling and tracking degradation from target reference.
All the end user has go to on is the wear and health info the drive maker spits out in the SMART data.

I stopped getting Samsung NVMe drives after the 970 pro, specifically due to their major downgrade in NAND, write endurance, and warranty.

 

[imsurgical]

I'm right around the corner from a major PC upgrade, this news couldn't have came at a better time since the 990 was my choice for primary drive. What are some solid alternative brands? My main priorities are performance and endurance (or at least much better than this).

The Solidigm P44 Pro is another solid alternative performance drive if the news concerns you, and at a competitive price. Check it out, Tom's did their own review of it and so did many other media outlets.

 

[USAFRet]

I wonder if this will be addressed by a firmware update. Like the initial problems with the 840 EVO were.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Thankfully I decided the Samsung 980 Pro was to be my last Samsung drive, other drives are faster and cheaper.

 

[ct007]

I have 3x 2TB 990 Pro, 1x 1TB Pro(OS drive) in my new PC I've had over a month running so far. All are at 100% except the 1TB, at 99%. 2400GB written on largest, and 918GB written on the 1TB.

 

[KEHinWA]

If I wrote off a maker every time, there was a problem, I would be storing data on stone tablets.
I would wait to see Then as is good with every build or year, review the tests and customer input.
What I don't know:

• AMD or INTEL systems
• Which platform
• OS version?

Is it a drive problem or is it some piece of software chewing on the drive until it wears out, which is a benefit of Samsung. Good software to monitor health.
I have had drives work perfectly in a system then have issues like not showing up randomly on next gen systems that came after the drive was made. This was Sabrent.

 

[razor512]

If I wrote off a maker every time, there was a problem, I would be storing data on stone tablets.
I would wait to see Then as is good with every build or year, review the tests and customer input.
What I don't know:

• AMD or INTEL systems
• Which platform
• OS version?

Is it a drive problem or is it some piece of software chewing on the drive until it wears out, which is a benefit of Samsung. Good software to monitor health.
I have had drives work perfectly in a system then have issues like not showing up randomly on next gen systems that came after the drive was made. This was Sabrent.

One issue that has been common is that it happened to users on windows 10, and windows 11 (based on some of their screenshots unless they were using some kind of win11 theme on windows 10 because they dislike having a functional UI.

As for writed, the whole issue is that the controller reportes very few writes, often less than 1 full drive write and they are already losing 3-5% health. Outside of that these m.2 NVMe SSDs are not like special enterprise drives where you have NAND interfaced directly to the PCIe bus, instead the NAND is insulated from the rest of the OS via the controller. You can issue read and write IOs, but you can't tell the SSD which exact NAND cell to write to, and you cannot write to them in a way that the controller will not record, unless you are desoldering the NAND chips and using some other device to write directly to them before returning them to the original PCB.

 

[ravewulf]

My 970 EVO and 980 Pro are reporting 98% and 97% respectively. However, I've noticed that whichever one is the OS drive ends up having bit rot corrupt a few files here and there every month (after running scandisk and checksumming against my backup). It's always old data files that haven't been accessed in a long time. But when used as a storage drive instead of an OS drive, the issue goes away.

 

[helper800]

My 970 EVO and 980 Pro are reporting 98% and 97% respectively. However, I've noticed that whichever one is the OS drive ends up having bit rot corrupt a few files here and there every month (after running scandisk and checksumming against my backup). It's always old data files that haven't been accessed in a long time. But when used as a storage drive instead of an OS drive, the issue goes away.

That is very odd. Maybe the controller does not parity check older files often enough for correction that they build up on unused data? If the controller only parity checks files that are used more often and less used files less often then I could see this happening.

 

[george198011]

Yeah. I've gotten bitten by the Samsung drives too. 980 Pro, I believe. Died in a couple days. I simply don't buy Samsung any more. I paid extra for the name, to not have to worry about it.

 

[Ar558]

I have two Crucial P5 Plus' a 1TB at 100% with 2.1TB written in 9 months, a 500GB at 99% with 4.4TB written in the same timespan. I'm never going to use their life up before they get replaced, I suspect it's the Samsung firmware misreporting, I can't imagine the drives are actually wearing at that rate it would seem very odd given the amount of R&D Samsung do it to this stuff.

 

[Bigshrimp]

Yeah. I've gotten bitten by the Samsung drives too. 980 Pro, I believe. Died in a couple days. I simply don't buy Samsung any more. I paid extra for the name, to not have to worry about it. And then it made me worry. Bzzzt. Yer out.

Yeah, after Samsung wouldn't repair a defective earbud that was in warranty, claiming it was not a US model, I stopped buying any of their products. The earbuds I bought even show US Model in the description and was purchased directly from Amazon. Samsung can stuff it where the sun doesn't shine... After I talked to Amazon about it, they went ahead and replaced the earbuds for me.

 

[TechieTwo]

Yeah, after Samsung wouldn't repair a defective earbud that was in warranty, claiming it was not a US model, I stopped buying any of their products. The earbuds I bought even show US Model in the description and was purchased directly from Amazon. Samsung can stuff it where the sun doesn't shine... After I talked to Amazon about it, they went ahead and replaced the earbuds for me.

FYI - Just because Amazon claims a product is a U.S. model does not make it true. They souce product from all over the world wherever they can get the cheapest price. They also often list incorrect info. IME. They may have replaced the product so you would not advertise the issue in forums because it can cost them a lot of highly profitable sales.

 

[boju]

Purchased late November, so far so good. First time checking it seeing this, was expecting the worst.

Windows 10 is on it plus games.

 

[dwd999]

But there doesn't seem to be any discussion of how the degraded drives are being used. Are they being used totally without heatsinks; or is there a motherboard heatsink? We know that heat can be a problem but no one reporting performance problems is saying whether or not their drives are mounted with heatsinks and what range of temperatures they normally operate at.