One of Samsung’s flagship SSDs has been giving users headaches with several reports of significantly decreased health which could limit its capacity.
The PCIe 4.0 990 Pro SSD, which is available in both 1TB and 2TB flavors, costs around $170/£160 and $290/£280 respectively, offering customers significant updates over the 980 model it replaces with up to 7,450 / 6,900 MB/s sequential read/write speeds.
It also gets access to Samsung’s Magician software, which is designed to help users optimize performance, protect data, get firmware updates, and monitor the drive’s health.
Samsung 990 Pro SSD problem
That piece of software has proven problematic to Samsung. Many users report seeing drops in their 990 Pro’s health in a short space of time, and without having reached the drive’s capacity.
Robbie Khan of Neowin (opens in new tab) wrote of a 1% drop in his 990 Pro’s health within a couple of days, using both Magician and third-party tools. He knew this wasn’t normal, because Khan also runs other Samsung drives with vast amounts of data stored on them, reporting still seeing 99% health after a year and a half.
“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%”, he said.
Khan sent his 990 Pro in for repair once it had dropped to 94%, but was later told that “there was no defect found”, and that his original hard drive had been reformatted and sent back to him.
Since then, other Internet users have complained about their own 990 Pro SSDs, including a number on Reddit (opens in new tab) and this Twitter (opens in new tab) user.
The German branch of Samsung has since issued a statement:
“Samsung stands behind the quality of its SSDs, including the new NVMe M.2 SSD 990 PRO. We are aware of reports of this issue and are currently investigating as user configurations vary.”
TechRadar Pro has asked Samsung whether it has any further developments on the issue affecting its flagship NVMe SSD; the company did not immediately respond to our request.
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