Based on a number of reviews, it appears like Samsung’s newest flagship solid-state drive – the Samsung 990 Professional (opens in new tab) – is experiencing some severe {hardware} issues.

A report revealed on Neowin (opens in new tab), which was preceded by the writer of the report posting on Reddit about his personal expertise with the problem, claims that the 990 Professional is shedding ‘drive well being’ at an alarmingly quick charge. Some customers have reported seeing drops of 10% in whole well being or extra inside only a matter of days.

The Samsung 990 Professional is probably one of the best SSD in the marketplace proper now (although it’ll price you a fairly penny, since that is some critically high-end storage), which means that loads of excited PC-builders may have bought one for his or her customized rigs when it launched again in November 2022. It’s unclear at this level precisely what number of SSDs are affected, however going by Reddit threads we are able to conclude that it has impacted a number of customers.

The severity varies, however thus far the worst occasion seems to be from Twitter person Neil Schofield (opens in new tab), who posted a screenshot from the SSD utility software program CrystalDisk – a program generally used to examine drive well being – exhibiting that his 990 Professional 2TB was down to only 64% after writing solely 2006GB of information to the drive. It’s not simply the 2TB model, both; we are able to affirm that different capacities are equally affected.

After studying your article, I assumed I might check out mine. The outcomes are horrendous! 36% worn out after writing lower than 2TB of information? @SamsungUK what’s going on? pic.twitter.com/VdzLoEAarNJanuary 22, 2023

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Evaluation: why is that this such a giant drawback?

For these not within the know, the ‘well being’ of a drive refers primarily to its total capability and effectiveness. A brand new drive ought to have 100% well being, whereas studying and writing knowledge to the drive will trigger it to degrade over time. This ‘put on and tear’ is regular and anticipated for SSDs, particularly these seeing heavy use.

The figures reported right here, although, are far past what we’d anticipate to see from regular SSD degradation; as one redditor famous (opens in new tab) within the feedback, their older 970 Evo 1TB drive was nonetheless at 97% well being after greater than 70TB value of information transfers.

It’s unclear proper now precisely what’s inflicting the problem, and Samsung has but to remark. Concerningly, the unique poster who complained and tried to RMA his drive had it returned to him with a declare kind Samsung that the problem was non-replicable, although the tech big’s RMA division has since provided a full substitute now that the story is gaining publicity.

It looks like Samsung isn’t certain both, for the reason that RMA group requested that the affected drive be returned (once more) for additional testing. Contemplating that the 990 Professional is supposedly rated for 1,200 TBW (Terabytes Written), writing 2TB of information ought to lead to a well being drop of about 0.17% – not the whopping 36% loss encountered by Schofield.

Reddit is abuzz with theories, with some customers speculating that it’d merely be a reporting bug producing incorrect values – although as Tom’s {Hardware} (opens in new tab) notes, customers have in contrast outcomes from a number of SSD monitoring applications and located the identical outcomes, and Samsung’s personal Magician software program refuses to correctly take a look at the drive.

The 990 Professional’s launch final yr was really pushed again from its authentic October launch (opens in new tab) for undisclosed causes, so it’s attainable that manufacturing points arose and the affected drives come from a faulty batch. Some customers have additionally theorized that Home windows is in charge, for the reason that solely unifying attribute among the many degrading SSDs is that they’re all boot drives for the OS. In any case, in the event you’re on the lookout for an SSD deal, we’d advise you to avoid the 990 Professional till the problem is resolved.