One of Samsung’s flagship SSDs has been giving users headaches with several reports of severely reduced health, which may limit its storage capacity.
PCIe 4.0 990 Pro SSDwhich is available in both 1TB and 2TB versions, costing around $170/£160 and $290/£280 respectively, offering customers significant upgrades over the 980 it replaces, with sequential read/write speeds of up to 7,450 / 6900MB/s.
It also accesses Samsung’s Magician software, which is designed to help users optimize performance, protect data, obtain firmware updates, and monitor drive health.
Problem with the Samsung 990 Pro drive
This firmware has proven problematic for Samsung. Many users report their 990 Pro drives dropping in health within a short period of time without reaching full drive capacity.
Robbie Khan z Neovin (opens in a new tab) wrote about a 1% drop in the health of his 990 Pro in a few days using both Magician and third-party tools. He knew this wasn’t normal as Khan also handles other Samsung drives with huge amounts of data stored on them, reporting that he still sees 99% health after a year and a half.
“Over the next day it dropped to 98%, and by that point I hadn’t even written 2TB to the drive. Fast-forward a few more days and the disk health was at 95%,” he said.
Khan sent his 990 Pro in for repair when its condition dropped to 94%, but was later told that “no damage was found” and his original hard drive was reformatted and sent back to him.
Since then, other Internet users have complained about the 990 Pro’s own SSDs, including the number Reddit (opens in a new tab) and this Twitter (opens in a new tab) user.
Samsung Germany has since issued a statement:
“Samsung stands behind the quality of its SSDs, including the new NVMe M.2 SSD 990 PRO. We are aware of reports of this issue and are currently investigating as user configurations vary.”
TechRadar Pro approached Samsung inquiring if it had any further information on the issue affecting its flagship NVMe SSD; the company did not immediately respond to our request.