Samsung 990 Pro: Service life is said to decrease rapidly

The PCIe 4.0 SSD Samsung 990 Pro, which was introduced in August 2022, is one of the fastest storage solutions with speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s. The SSD is said to have a very short lifespan after only a few read and write operations. However, reports are currently doing the rounds that the SSD flagship is causing problems: The SSD’s lifespan is said to drop rapidly after just a few read and write operations.

Samsung 990 Pro: Lifespan decreases rapidly

At least around 140 Euros are currently due for the Samsung 990 Pro, one of the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs in the consumer segment. However, the high quality and long life of the Pro-SSD does not seem to reach the level that one is used to for mean from Samsung in the current edition.

As Neowin, among others, reports, the “health” status of the 990 Pro seems to decrease rapidly. According to his own statement, an editor switched from the 970 Evo Plus to the 990 Pro. While the former still had a durability of 99 percent after one year of use, the newly acquired Samsung 990 Pro from author Robbie Khan already lost one percent of its durability after two days.

The value dropped to 98 percent after only 2 TB of written data, and even to 95 percent a few days later. However, what could now also be a possible defect or display error in the tools like Samsung Magician or CrystalDiskInfo is not an isolated case.

Several users report problems with Samsung 990 Pro

In the forums of Overclockers and Reddit, an increasing number of Samsung 990 Pro owners are reporting similar problems and an equally rapidly declining health status of the new SSD.

“Same here, 88 percent Health since installation in December 2022, I’m losing around 1 percent per week […],” writes user FSx3 on the Overclockers forum, for example.

Twitter user Neil Schofield even shares a worrying screenshot in response to Khan’s post: Here, the SSD has already lost 36 percent in health status and that’s after writing less than two terabytes of data.

The values are based on the SMART parameters, which are output by tools like CrystalDiskInfo or Samsung’s own Magician software. That the value drops over time is quite normal – but the speed is worrying in this case. After all, the 990 Pro is supposed to reach 1,200 Total Bytes Written (TBW) in the case of the 2 TB model. Actually. So here, just a few terabytes of written data shouldn’t be able to have a noticeable impact on the lifespan at all.

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Just a display bug?

Neowin writer Khan reported the error to Samsung, going through the entire RMA process. A decrease in overall condition was quite normal, Samsung had told him, and returned the same SSD formatted and reset to factory defaults, as they could not find any errors.