2TB 990 Pro dying faster than it should despite new firmware

rjblake · ‎10-11-2023

I have 2x 990 Pro 2TB SSDs which are now both running latest firmware and the wearout is already at 2%. Both drives were installed on 31-May-2023.

drive 1: 11.6 TBW
drive 2: 4.6 TBW

According to the maths, this means that the drives are failing 2x and 4x faster than the rated 1,200TBW life! How can this be? I realise this is somewhat academic, given this still equates to some 20 years; but I have another SAMSUNG MZVL21T0HCLR-00BH1, which is a 1TB drive with 4.5TBW and 0% wearout. Something does not add up, or is it Samsung ramping up the decay of newer NVMEs? Seems rather fishy to me. Any thoughts?

PaulC59 · ‎10-11-2023

It's worth checking you don't have any disk optimisation or scanning software active on the drives as it adds unnecessary premature wear and tear. At 4%ish per year that would give an approx life of 25yrs for a drive, which isn't actually that bad considering an average lifespan of a standard HDD is 5 to 10yrs? However my suspicion is something is scanning the drives in the background and could be affecting the results. I hope this helps

rjblake · ‎28-11-2023

@PaulC59 - thanks for this. A few things to note:

There is no disk optimisation or scanning software running.
The wear on both drives is 2% despite the TBW being vastly lower on one drive
A Kingston 1TB NVME drive has 0% wear with 14TBW (I'd have expected this to be higher vs. Samsung if it is being measured correctly)
All drives are installed in the same systems and running the same applications on Linux

As for the expected lifespan at this rate, I fully accept that they'll likely last well past their warranty period. However, the workloads are going to increase and I expect so will the rate of wear. At the current rate of TBW, it will be unlikely that they'll meet the 1200TBW rating.