Private customers currently have to pay at least 140 euros for one of the fastest consumer SSDs with the PCIe 4.0 standard. With its Pro models, Samsung usually stands for comparatively high quality and a long service life. The Samsung 990 Pro now seems to scratch this image, like its colleagues from Neowin to report. The overall condition of the M.2 SSD is said to deteriorate significantly faster than the predecessors Samsung 980 Pro and 970 Pro.
After purchasing a 2 TB Samsung 990 Pro, Neowin reporter Robbie Khan found that tools such as the in-house Samsung Magician and CrystalDiskInfo were already reporting an overall health status of just 99 percent. Not a big cut, one assumes. Only a few days later, however, this dropped to below 95 percent, which could very well indicate a possible defect or display error within the software. A rare case? Khan doesn’t seem to be alone with the problems. In the forum of overclockers and via Reddit More and more owners of the Samsung 990 Pro are reporting similar problems. In most cases, Samsung’s Magician software can analyze possible errors, but due to a two-year-old NVMe driver, the company’s latest flagship SSD isn’t yet fully supported. Likewise, no firmware updates are available (yet) that could address the problem.
Samsung support does not detect errors
Meanwhile, the Samsung support shows unreasonable. A drop in overall condition of a few percent is normal, the RMA department told Khan. Even after Samsung checked the NVMe SSD, no problems could be found. Formatted and reset to factory settings, the journalist received the SSD back without giving any details for the time being. When asked, the support indicated that no errors could be found.
An official statement from Samsung is pending, while the overall health of affected 990 Pro SSDs continues to decline. Many buyers are now hoping for a display error that could be fixed with a firmware update. Others turn their backs on Samsung and speak of declining quality in recent years.
Hard cases: After just a few days and weeks at around 2 TBW (Total Bytes Written in TB), the condition of the Samsung 990 Pro drops to 93 percent. The manufacturer promises a reliability of up to 1200 TBW for the 2 TB version.
For comparison: The overall condition of the Samsung 980 Pro and 970 Pro SSDs that we use is still 98 to 99 percent, even after several thousand hours and write processes in excess of 30 TBW.
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