Samsung 990 Pro users report rapid SSD health degradation: How is it affecting – Times of India

Solid State Drives (SSDs) storages are faster and more efficient than traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Users can check the health of their storage drives with an SSD utility which is a graphical user interface (GUI) based tool that is designed to help users maintain, monitor and tune their SSDs. If you check the health of a new SSD, ideally it should be at 100% which eventually reduces when you start writing data to the drive. SSD health degradation is a natural thing but it might be a problem when the value starts decreasing exponentially even when you are not writing any data to the drive. According to a report by Tom’s Hardware, multiple Samsung SSD users have reported a health issue with their storage drives. As per the report, several Samsung 990 Pro users have complained that the health of their SSDs is deteriorating at a rapid rate.
Samsung 990 Pro health issue: Affected SSDs
The report mentions that the entire Samsung 990 Pro lineup (regardless of the capacity) has been affected by this issue. Some of these SSDs are showing over 10% health loss in a matter of days or weeks, the report adds. Samsung 990 Pro’s health degradation issue was initially reported on Overclock.net forums in December 2022. Since then, more users have complained about the same issue as more reports started emerging.
Samsung 990 Pro health issue: How is it affecting users
A user who owns a 2TB SSD reported a health loss of 7% in one month with just 6,641GB written to the drive. Another Samsung 990 Pro user mentioned a 12% deterioration since the SSD’s installation in December. This user wrote 27.9TB to the drive and discovered that the drive’s health is falling nearly 1% every week.
Another Reddit user noticed a 6% drop in the health of his Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD and sent the drive back to the tech giant. Samsung reportedly returned the drive and claimed that it didn’t find any defects. The company even formatted the drive and restored it to its factory settings. Moreover, Samsung also offered the user a replacement and asked him to replicate the issue.

Apart from this, a Twitter user named Neil Schofield has reported the worst case and even shared a screenshot to demonstrate his SSD issue. As per the tweet, Schofield’s Samsung 990 Pro SSD showed a 64% health status only after writing a mere 2TB.
Samsung promises 1,200 TBW (TeraBytes Written) for the Samsung 990 Pro SSD. This means, 1% equals 12TB of written data and a 93% health status means the user has already written about 84TB of data.

Samsung 990 Pro: What’s causing the issue
The report didn’t mention if it’s a hardware issue with the Samsung 990 Pro that is causing the rapid health degradation or whether the health values shown for these SSDs are an error on the software side. Samsung is expected to conduct a thorough investigation to resolve this issue.
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