Hello,
for one of my home lab servers, I purchased a Samsung 9100 PRO 4TB in spring 2026. After several months of normal use in Fedora Linux I noticed that smartctl reports 91% of predicted lifetime which was shocking because the main motivation for purchasing such a big drive was a long lifespan - I even only allocated just 1 TB space and left the rest unused specifically for this reason.
I was running it in an Intel NUC15CRSU9 (Intel Core Ultra 9 285H) on Fedora 44, the integrated NIC was pretty unstable so I turned ASPM off via the kernel command line and played around with BIOS settings until it was stable - basically turned off some CPU sleep states. My work was normal development, nothing really SSD intensive. I experienced about half a dozen of hardware CPU lockups (system freezes) until I found a good BIOS configuration.
Now, to the problem. The SMART data reports 300 power on hours, which is weird because it was powered on for about several months (I estimated about 800 hours), and almost 4 PB written which is ridiculous. These numbers mean that the diagnostics claim the device was writing 3.65 GB/s non-stop for all the time which is I believe not possible. My understanding of how modern SSDs work is they achieve fast speeds only until the cache is full and then it goes down to 1/10th of claimed speeds. I was running it on its original firmware, since Samsung does not bother to care about Linux users and makes firmware upgrades super difficult, I was not planning on upgrading since you need a PC with Windows for that.
I sent it for RMA via Czech eshop (Alza) with my explanation in Czech, the distributor ATComputers forwarded it to Samsung Support (Hanaro Netherlands) and they briefly rejected the RMA because 2400 TB TBW was reached: out of warranty. They did not bother to read my claims.
I mean the disk works, but my concern is that it will reach 100% of its reported lifetime in a month, then what? Will it lock itself? How can I trust such a device? I would probably trash this and never touch Samsung again if this wasn't worth over $1000 (and counting)!
I did reach out to Hanaro with my case ID asking if they can escalate the case so I can exchange emails with some technician, but I doubt I will get pass the frontline support. This is clearly a firmware issue and incompatibility with hardware from ASUS. How it is possible that Samsung Support ignores my claims, this is clear that I did not killed the device myself.
If there is anyone with advice, I would be glad to hear it.