Samsung 990 Pro SSDs Report Rapid Health Degradation

Samsung 990 Pro SSDs Report Rapid Health Degradation

According to multiple reports, the health of Samsung’s latest flagship solid-state drive, the Samsung 990 Pro, is deteriorating at a breakneck pace. The problem seems to affect the entire Samsung 990 Pro lineup regardless of the capacity, with some Samsung SSD drives showing over 10% less health in a matter of days or weeks.

The health of an SSD is at 100% if you check it with an SSD utility, such as CrystalDiskInfo, when you first take it out of the box. But, eventually, the number goes down when you start writing data to the SSD drive. This 'wear and tear' is normal and expected for SSDs, especially those seeing heavy use. The problem is when that value starts decreasing exponentially, and you haven’t been writing any data to the SSD.

It’s unclear at this point exactly how many Samsung 990 Pro SSDs are affected, but going by Reddit threads we can conclude that it has impacted multiple users. One Redditor, who saw his Samsung 990 Pro 2TB lifespan go down 6% in two weeks, sent his SSD to Samsung for RMA. However, the company reportedly returned the same drive claiming that it didn’t find any defects, and it formatted the drive and restored it to factory settings. Subsequently, Samsung has offered the Redditor a replacement and will try to replicate the problem.

In the meantime, it’s uncertain if there’s an actual SSD hardware issue with the Samsung 990 Pro that causes rapid health degradation or whether the reported health values are an error on the software side. However, the SSD software obviously grabs the data from the S.M.A.R.T health parameters, so the information should be solid. Moreover, users have confirmed different software, such as Samsung Magician, CrystalDiskInfo, and Hard Disk Sentinel, are reporting the same value. Nonetheless, we can’t discard the possibility of it being a firmware or reporting bug.

There are not many clues to go on for the moment. The only common ground is that the affected Samsung 990 Pro SSDs are drives for storing the operating system. So it’s plausible that Microsoft Windows may not be playing nice with the Samsung 990 Pro. Alternatively, specific batches of drives may just be defective as it has happened before. Therefore, this health degradation issue with the Samsung 990 Pro SSDs certainly merits an investigation on Samsung’s part.

Still, all SSDs have a limited number of write cycles, so the ability to write on them will eventually wear out and may lead to data loss. If that happens, the Samsung 990 Pro SSD owners will need to contact a professional data recovery services provider like ACE Data Recovery team. Although every SSD recovery situation is unique, ACE Data Recovery engineers can develop custom solutions for retrieving data from failed SSD drives. ACEs are ready to help the Samsung 990 Pro SSD owners with their data recovery needs.