Samsung's 990 Pro NVME is DESTROYING Itself?

Let's get started with Samsung. You know, over the years, Samsung really built a great reputation when it comes to solid-state storage. Their EVO and PRO lineup were definitely the top tier. I remember I was super excited when I got my first NVME drive. it was the 970 Evo, a super popular model. And it's 5 years later and still going strong. Other brands now are also solid contenders, but there isn’t really one with Samsung’s pedigree.

Now though… Things might change. The company recently released its 990 pro nvme drive. It's still PCIe Gen 4, and it's blazing fast almost maxing out the Gen 4 standard. It does up to 7450 MB per second in reads and up to 6,900 MB per second in writes. Plus, thanks to a better controller and newer firmware optimized for direct storage, this drive should be a beast in all categories. Tweaktown even gave it a 99% rating.

Anyways, it's a great drive! So why did I say that things might change? Well.. reports are coming left and right of this drive basically killing itself. One of the first reports was from Midian on the overclock dot net forums. About a month after he bought his drive, he noticed that the health of the drive had already dropped down to 93%... OUCH. Could it be that he abused his drive ? Well not really. Crystal disk info shows that he only wrote about 7 TB worth of data. And if you do the math, given that 990 Pro’s are rated for 1200 Terabytes written,

That means he should be at 84 terabyte written to get to that 7% of usage. So maybe he got a bad drive? Well, if we jump over to reddit, Robbie kanh posted that his 990 pro also dropped significantly in health. Thanks to those 2 posts, this information was spread a little more by outlets like PC gamer and Tweaktown.

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#Samsung #990Pro #NVme

[danhoven]

From Samsung Feb 13 2023.
"These anomalies were found to be caused by issues with the 990 PRO SSD's firmware. Accordingly, a firmware update was released February 13, 2023, that fixes these anomalies".
There's a lot more info online regarding this now, such as a firmware update will not reset smart values. Basically from what I read this will not reset current values but stop the bad reporting in saying the SSD has lost much more health than it has. So again, how I understand it is that pre-update your SSD says it lost 10% of life already (which is false), they fixed the cause of why it was reporting incorrectly, but those values are I guess written in a way they cannot erase them, so it will still show a life remaining as it does before the update but will stop it from collecting false data.

[clintcordero]

How do you view the health of your drive?

[netronin]

Putting the 990 in "full performance mode" does give you a warning that you could lower the life of your drive.
Just leave it in standard mode, you get the same speeds but it allows your drive to go to sleep. See if that helps.
Right now I have no issues with my 990.

[Romoredux]

PSA: IF YOU ARE BUYING A NEW 990 PRO THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM. Purchased 2 990 pro 2TB and they are using the "FIXED DEGRADATION FIRMWARE". 0B2QJXG7 (G= Good D=the bad firmware). There is a new Firmware update about SSD NVMe tempature problems but I am not having an issue w/ that.

[alrez]

share my 2cents here...got 990pro2Tb>2, 5TBwritten>93% left and aswell a 980pro2TB>3, 5TBwritten>100% left... both bought installed same time same machine around 3 months ago, bought new&sealed, good cooled no overusage or whatever

[ragingmonk]

Man, melting power connectors, dry vapor chambers and suicide NVMe drives. PC gaming going to h*ll.

[ryan]

Mine 990 2TB is 97%, after 3.8TB written, 232 hours power on and 121 power on count

[Knifetography]

My 1TB 990 Pro is @ 100% w/ 2.5TBW and 2TBR. OS is openSUSE Tumbleweed w/ BTRFS.
I notice these are 2TB drives. I wonder if there's a FW bug with em.

[GarrickStrom]

Yikes, I just checked my 1TB 990 Pro, and with 796GB read, 1203GB write, only 10 power on count, my health status is at 77%!

[my-yt-inputs]

I've seen it suggested one possible issue is an out of date or incompatible Windows NVMe driver. The default Windows NVMe driver hasn't been updated for quite a while now. Even Samsung's advanced NVMe driver does not work with the 980 or 990 drives. I'd be curious how Linux software is reporting on these drives?

[stephenfuller]

Great. I just upgraded to a 990 Pro boot drive to replace a 980 Pro. I was curious...okay? I've only had it in my system two weeks. But I'll be keeping a close eye on it.

[imqqmi]

I think it's also worth confirming the wear level when you just received it. It might be a returned/refurbished product sold as new? With the same number of bytes written to it does the wear level drop equally? If not, I wo7ldn't worry about it unless you write an inordinate amount every month and have to squeeze out every last percentage.

[damonbakos]

dude i purchased one of these over the holiday sales and it killed itself zero return policy

[robertobokarev]

Even outside of benchmarks 990 pro model has something others don't - huge random read/write operations per second. When this nvme working with decent files like several gigs, which is the most common case, it achieves almost 1 gig per second while others barely reach speeds of ssds

[asdf]

This is relevant to me because i just picked up a 2TB 990 Pro to go into a new PC I'm working on. I usually go 980 Pro, but for some reason I didn't this time. Looks like I'll have to consider this as a possibility and see if there are ways to mitigate the problem.

[TheOne]

firmware update fixed this problem on the 990 and 980 pro samsung nvme ssd this was caused by a bad firmware which is now fixed

[BeckOfficial]

Just bought my 1TB 990 pro two months ago. It has written 3, 4TB and is at 95% health. Just updated firmware. If it keeps dropping I will be returning it. My 1TB WESTERN DIGITAL WD Black SN750 is at 100% with 18TB writes.

[Latin]

Is there a way someone can do a test to read-write to the drive to see what happens when the life expectancy hits zero? Maybe it's a reporting error and it will just keep working. It still sucks that there is this issue.

[Bman]

I have a 980 Pro and one thing I didn't realize is how much life seems to be carved off the SSD just from running a performance benchmark test. I can't remember the exact amount it used but, according to the Magician software I went from around 4.2 TBW to 4.5 just from running the benchmark. Maybe that's normal but, I was surprised.

[videocruzer]

I bought one about 7 months ago and a couple of months ago the drive started spiking 70-100% every few seconds. rebooting did nothing, made gaming and using the pc very laggy until i reinstalled the windows, I just assumed that i was hacked and or a virus. just this past friday it started to do it again, but only spiking 50-60% every few seconds, went to reboot and the system gave a HD error. something to the effect of the drive is failing and to back up all your data. The system would not boot past this screen, the BIOS showed the drive but I was unable to get the system to boot until I unplugged the 990pro m.2 from the socket and plugged it back in, I also had to remove the gpu just to be able to reach the M.2 socket as I have an air cooled cpu, so its a deep tight area. after reseating the 990pro 1TB drive that came with a stock heat sync, the system booted and the drive is not showing huge activity spikes every few seconds. But the drive has never settled to 0% activity, it always floats 0-2% about every second, I assumed it is windows 11 bloat war/ spy stuff, but have done everything i can do and or learn to turn that stuff off, and or uninstall those parts of windows 11. The computer store I bought my parts from when i told them, they asked me to bring in the whole PC to see if they could recreate the error. since it seems to be working fine I did not want to be left without my PC over the Canadian holiday this weekend. I am going to DL that app that you talked about, run it and post the results here.