When you buy the fastest flagship SSD on the market, you expect a certain level of reliability and confidence from its performance, but things can and do go wrong sometimes, and customer support is paramount at instilling continued confidence in the brand. This has typically been the case for past Samsung drives, actually, even the non-flagship models have been highly reliable and perform excellently with very few that I have seen needing an RMA.
Colour me with sadness when within just a couple of days of buying the 990 Pro 2TB, I noticed that the drive health according to SMART data from both Samsung Magician and third party tools had dropped to 99%. For the record I have other Samsung SSDs with over 40TB written and still at 99% health 1.5 years later, so I knew this was not normal.
Within another day or so it had dropped to 98%, by this point I’d not even written 2TB to the drive. Fast forward a couple more days and the drive health was sitting at 95%
Something was clearly not right. I quizzed a a few tech communities online to find that I was not alone. I reached out to Samsung Memory by phone (Hanaro Europe BV deal with all Samsung storage related after sales support). I was told by a friendly voice that a few percentage drop was normal and if it continued to drop then I could send it in for RMA.
It is worth pointing out at this point that the Samsung NVMe driver for Windows does not support the 990 Pro. Without this driver you cannot run any extended SMART tests in Samsung’s Magician application as it says it needs the correct driver. This driver has not been updated since 2020.
Around the same time I posted to OcUK and reddit to see if others had seen the same problem, as it turns out, they had, and there is a lengthy thread over at Overclock.net about it. Once my drive had dropped to 94% I filed the RMA with Samsung/Hanaro.
A few days later a shipment was on its way to me from Samsung/Hanaro. I had to email Hanaro to get info on what was found only to be told that the same drive is on its way back because no defect was found. Their email below:
Naturally this is confusing, I had provided all the requested details and screenshots as evidence, yet Samsung’s RMA folks neglected to actually check and clarify the issue at hand. I replied back asking for written confirmation that this sort of drop is normal in such a short space of time with such a low number of data written to the drive. It has been 5 days and no reply.
The CrystalDiskInfo screenshot above shows the drive’s health after it came back from Samsung RMA. The email from Hanaro states that the drive was reset to factory defaults, if this was the case then the drive’s health should also have been reset to 100% but what we see is a drive that has simply been reformatted and nothing more. At the time of writing there is also no new firmware for the 990 Pro series.
If any of our readers have bought a 990 Pro model, then please share your experiences in the comments, has your drive dropped health percentage too? is it a boot drive or a storage only drive? It would be interesting to find out.