Samsung 990 PRO Flagship SSD Has an Endurance Problem, Users Notice Rapid Drive-Health Drops

[bonehead123]

#WD4ME#

'nuff said

 

[cfenton]

This sounds like a firmware bug to me. There's no way it's actually using that much of the drive's life. Even the worst QLC drives don't wear that fast.

 

[GabrielLP14]

Am i reading this correctly? People freaking out because of 6%

 

[TotallyRandomPerson]

I've got four Samsung sata ssds in one machine - 1TB 850 evo from 2015, a 1TB & 2TB 860 evo from 2020 and a 4TB 870 evo from 2021, and they're all "99% good"...but...man, if a company comes along and says "no" to a legitimate enquiry, then changes their tune when they find out that they're actually dealing with the press, then I'll go elsewhere next time.

 

[okidna]

Am i reading this correctly? People freaking out because of 6%

What about 36% with less than 2 TB written?

 

[chodaboy19]

I put comsumer grade SSDs(Samsung, Seagate, Crucial) in NAS / workstations in RAID and only Samsung had this rapid failing issue.

Funny that you mention that, I bought 2x 970 Evo Plus 1TB nvme drives in my NAS and one failed within 3 months with barely any writes. I've also had 2x ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB nvme in the same NAS and they worked without issues for 3 years. Samsung did replace with failed 970 Evo Plus with a refurbished unit, is that normal for a 3 month old nvme ssd?

 

[Punkenjoy]

This sounds like a firmware bug to me. There's no way it's actually using that much of the drive's life. Even the worst QLC drives don't wear that fast.

This is exactly what i though

 

[xorbe]

Are you sure the "raw value" on this drive is 1% increments and not something much finer grained?

 

[GabrielLP14]

What about 36% with less than 2 TB written?
View attachment 280668

Now that is in fact something to be raise questions.

 

[ThrashZone]

What about 36% with less than 2 TB written?
View attachment 280668

Hi,
If you're samsung/... they would prefer you stop looking like the majority of buyers and just wait for it to die a natural death

 

[Tomorrow]

This sounds like a firmware bug to me. There's no way it's actually using that much of the drive's life. Even the worst QLC drives don't wear that fast.

Would not be the first time.

I had and still have some Samsung PM9A1's. It's essentially an OEM version of 980 Pro without the copper heatspreader. When Gen4 drives came out it was the cheapest (but still expensive costing ~350 for 2TB). That is why i bought 3 of them. One for OS. One for games and one for data. Got rid of of 3 SATA drives and 6 cables thanks to that.

But soon after the rated performance dropped. It was supposed to be around 5000/5000 but dropped to 1400/3000.
Nothing i did fixed it. And later it started spitting out errors. Specifically Media Errors in SMART data. This resulted in corrupted files on the drive.

Eventually i managed to find a command line utility to upgrade the firmware (OEM drives cant be updated trough Magician). But it was too late for one of the drives.
It went into read only mode and soon after did not display anything but was still visible in BIOS and device manager.
It was the one where i had games. So not a big loss.

After the firmware update the media error count stopped going up on the two remaining drives and performance is restored.
But the whole experience has not left a good impression. I mean i knew what i was getting into buying an OEM drive but these errors and drop in performance was not what i expected from Samsung.

Still waiting for RMA on the failed drive. Been waiting since November last year.
My next drive will NOT be Samsung.

 

[Blaazen]

Note that TBW is almost impossible to test. We have to believe to manufacturer. We have detailed reviews here on TPU, synthetic benchmarks, real world benchmarks and even pictures from thermal camera. But do the drives have really declared TBW? That's unanswered.

 

[Nanochip]

I remember when Samsung used to be the top dog in the consumer ssd market but their drives have been plagued with issues. The 970 EVO had a firmware bug that crashed macOS if installed in a Macintosh but that got resolved.

This issue here with endurance problems is a shame.

 

[ssdpro]

Silly. Samsung hasn't used high endurance quality NAND since the MLC 970 Pro. Those drives are a tank and plenty fast.

 

[evernessince]

You have to assume that Samsungs RMA SOPs are flawed if a drive can drop to that low health with so few hours, especially given the rated endurance.

my sabrent nvme 1tb on crystal info say 96% health for only 1917gb written. Sabrent utility say 100% health LUL...

What's the TBW rating of your drive? 96% is extremely low for only 1.917 TBW. Doing the math, that would mean your drive's endurance is only 47.925 TBW. It's more likely that Crystal Disk Info is misreporting your drive's health or there are other SMART issues aside from endurance. It's more likely that the Sabrent Utility is reporting the correct health value as manufacturer utilities know how to interpret raw SMART values of their own drives. Each manufacturer reports different raw SMART values so it's not possible for Crystal Disk Info to always be accurate.

 

[Tomorrow]

You have to assume that Samsungs RMA SOPs are flawed if a drive can drop to that low health with so few hours, especially given the rated endurance.



What's the TBW rating of your drive? 96% is extremely low for only 1.917 TBW. Doing the math, that would mean your drive's endurance is only 47.925 TBW. It's more likely that Crystal Disk Info is misreporting your drive's health or there are other SMART issues aside from endurance. It's more likely that the Sabrent Utility is reporting the correct health value as manufacturer utilities know how to interpret raw SMART values of their own drives. Each manufacturer reports different raw SMART values so it's not possible for Crystal Disk Info to always be accurate.

Samsung's own Magician reports the same numbers as CDI.

Some stats from my two Samsung drives:
512GB PM9A1: 52TB written. 92% life remaining.
2TB PM9A1: 11TB written. 100% life remaining.

But the initial impression was the same. It dropped 1-2% on the 512GB by just benchmarking and installing the OS.

 

[john_]

Some ultra cheap controller paired with DRAMLESS design, sometime with QLC too just to add insult to injury, and you get a SSD on wheelchair.

I was looking at those two replies I got from them. The text from my previous post was in their second reply. In their first reply they where saying (in my opinion)BS about SLC cache and SSD usage over 70% that was leading to those performance drops. I mean, yeah, a reply saying more or less "if you fill your SSD over 70%, then it's a feature to have speeds at 5MB/sec. Don't worry". And stuff like "Oh, format your SSD, empty it completely and then run those benchmarks.

Anyway for me TeamGroup is a no go and I bet Samsung will lose some customers with their reply in this case. But in the end companies probably lose less by losing some customers to the next one than having to fulfill those RMAs. Because in the end it's a circle.

Customer A is angry with company X, decides to buy only products of company Y
Customer B is angry with company Y, decides to buy only products of company Z
Customer C is angry with company Z, decides to buy only products of company V
Customer D is angry with company V, decides to buy only products of company X

It's a circle.

PS. About Samsung. Let's not forget their firmware problems with 830 EVO also.

 

[zlobby]

Huehuehue!

Imagine the poor SOBs who need to claim warranty. Samsung will put them through hell before they honor a warranty.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Silly. Samsung hasn't used high endurance quality NAND since the MLC 970 Pro. Those drives are a tank and plenty fast.

Yeah to call the 980 a PRO when it is clearly just a 980 EVO is a joke. It's actually slower than the 970 Pro in a fair few benchmarks and even gets beatne by the 970 EVO Plus in a few too. Overpriced and better alternatives abound.

 

[Crackong]

Funny that you mention that, I bought 2x 970 Evo Plus 1TB nvme drives in my NAS and one failed within 3 months with barely any writes. I've also had 2x ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB nvme in the same NAS and they worked without issues for 3 years. Samsung did replace with failed 970 Evo Plus with a refurbished unit, is that normal for a 3 month old nvme ssd?

In my case it was 3x 4TB 870 evo aged 1 year / 6 months / 3 months in RAID5 respectively.
They all had bad sector error around the same time, then all died within 2 weeks.

Thankfully,
Warranty service replaced them with new drives and I simply restored everything from a backup.

 

[zlobby]

Lulz! I just realized my S23 is on preorder.

In my case it was 3x 4TB 870 evo aged 1 year / 6 months / 3 months in RAID5 respectively.
They all had bad sector error around the same time, then all died within 2 weeks.

Thankfully,
Warranty service replaced them with new drives and I simply restored everything from a backup.

Still a horror story in my book! I get the hair on my back rise if even one disk in a RAID shows signs of failure. I can't possibly imagine a catastrophic failure like that, even though I use georedundancy.

 

[AsRock]

I was watching a video about a user having this issue, 93% after no more than 10TB ( owned for a month ) writes and apparently samsung told them it's a none issue.

We'll see.

 

[Crackong]

Lulz! I just realized my S23 is on preorder.

Still a horror story in my book! I get the hair on my back rise if even one disk in a RAID shows signs of failure. I can't possibly imagine a catastrophic failure like that, even though I use georedundancy.

To keep my【Treasure】 safe I do regular backup to a secondary RAID within the same NAS ( with hard drives) then rotational backup to 2 USB external drives.
Since the failure only breaches the primary RAID, drive replacement + restore from the secondary RAID is all it needed.
Downtime is about 2 days

Thank god I did all the preparation.

 

[Psychoholic]

Looks Like I got lucky with my 2TB 990 Pro

 

[ironmanjakarta]

CrystaldiskInfo 8
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB 500.1 GB
Windows 10
43TB WRITES
95% GOOD

Is that good?