Samsung is known for making some of the fastest, most reliable solid-state drives (SSDs), but owners of the company’s latest high-end drive might disagree. Some folks running the Samsung 990 Pro SSD, including yours truly, claim their drives are degrading at a vastly increased rate. This suggests the spendy new drives may not last more than a year or two before giving up the ghost. Predictably, Samsung has been a pain about warranty claims.
SSDs don’t have the mechanical issues associated with spinning hard drives, but even the best NVMe drives don’t last forever. Successive write cycles will wear out the memory cells, causing them to become unable to store data. There are plenty of programs to monitor the wear rate, which is usually measured in hundreds of terabytes even in the worst case. So, it’s quite odd that owners of the 990 Pro have seen wear rates far higher.
Over at Neowin, Robbie Khan noticed that his new 990 Pro was degrading at a rate of about 1% per week. After trying and failing to get Samsung to replace the drive, Khan posted an article about it. Naturally, Samsung reached out to replace the drive at that time, but other owners have since realized their drives are wearing out at an even faster pace. One person on Twitter found they’d lost 32% of the drive’s life after just 2TB of writes. Samsung’s past NVMe drives would drop just a percent or two in a year with tens of terabytes of use.
As it happens, I too own a Samsung 990 Pro SSD, which I bought just a few weeks ago. Take a look below — after writing 2TB of data, my 1TB drive reports 94% life remaining. At this rate, my SSD will hit zero after writing just 33TB, which I’ll probably hit in 12 to 18 months (yes, I’m a very heavy user). That’s not the kind of longevity I would expect from any SSD, let alone Samsung’s most premium drive.
Samsung is apparently aware of the problem, so you might have more luck getting a drive replaced. Of course, you shouldn’t have to do that, and if this is a widespread issue, getting a replacement 990 Pro won’t do you any good. Are we supposed to replace the 990 Pro annually? Most people are using these as boot drives, so replacing them is a major pain in the neck. We’ve reached out to Samsung for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
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