PNY's tech support

[Nebulous]

I'm having a "discussion" with PNY's tech support named "Bruce" about my NVME drive.

In less than 90 days of having it, the health percentage dropped a point and it has over 3.0TB of writes I don't have anything on the drive aside from the OS. All my proggies, games, music & movies are on separate platter drives. I don't understand how in less than 3 months I've written 3tb of crap on it, not to mention it's already degrading

Here's the convo:

Me:
Hello Bruce,

I'm a little confused about the health level of my PNY NVMe drive. Not 90 days (3months) and already the drive's health level drop a percentile. Now I'm aware of reads & writes take a toll on a mechanical drive/platter drive, but it hasn't been a year and already the NVMe drive is showing signs of degradation so soon. Not only my drive but my colleague's drive as well. Do these drives have a short lifespan? Should we be concerned and start looking for replacement drives?

Attached is a screenshot of HD Sentinel from my drive;

Thank you


Bruce's reply:
You have written 2.77TB to a 240GB hard drive in only 62 days. Yes, I would say which that extreme write through in such a short period of time that you will slowly continue to see drive degradation.

Bruce

Technical Support


Me:
Hi Bruce,

That's extremely odd as all I have on this drive is windows 10 and nothing else. All my programs are on separate Western Digital NAS drives. Not only does it run extremely hot past it's rated safe operating temperatures, but it's degrading an alarming quick rate. I will presume that this drive will fail in less than a year and now I have to purchase a replacement NVMe drive asap which I am not happy about. I will not purchase another PNY product again and will notify my colleagues to avoid.

Thank you for your time.

Bruce's reply:
Your own SSD report does not lie. 2.77TB has been written to this drive in a little over two months and I would imagine constant writes like this are going to make the device pretty hot. That type of write through does not happen to an average user using it for an operating system for years. I would suggest investigating why your system is writing so much to the drive in such a short time period. If you do this to *any* drive you are certainly going to have problems, PNY brand or not.

Bruce

Technical Support


Me:
I'm sorry Bruce, but that is unacceptable. My friend's drive which is the other drive purchased by me at the same time, is even worse. In 48 days it's already 6.08TB written which is not normal. His drive already lost a percentile in 31 days of usage with a new OS install and nothing else. He also surfs the forums & emails. Coincidence?

When I installed the drive with nothing on it, temps were already hitting the 70c mark and I didn't install the OS on it yet. My friend's drive was even worse temp wise. I find it odd that my friend's drive, which is identical and purchased at the same time, yet installed 30 days later, has more writes than mine.

Unsure if this is a fluke, but in all my years of building, benching, voltmoddings, watercooling and gaming computers I have never seen anything like this. That one particular drive will write almost 3TB of data while I'm on forums or checking my emails is ridiculous.

I'm just stating that this is not normal behavior and there is nothing in the backgound of my pc that is writing 3TB in less than 90 days, nor can I find anything doing it. It is my responsibility to voice my dismay and concern about your product.

My 2.5 SSD's (LiteOn, Sandisk Ultra) don't have this much writes on them when I was using them as my OS drives for over 2 years which the NVMe drive has replaced.


Thanks again for your time.

What kind of BS is this guy trying to spoonfeed me?

*Update*

Bruce's rebuttal:

Hello Dino,

We do not even know if the program that you are using is accurate and we do not support or recommend any type of software that checks drive data such as this. If it is accurate however, it looks normal. You are using the drive. You will see degradation over time.
Even at 1% degradation after two+ months you would still have YEARS before the drive would have reached 0%. That is more or less the life expectancy of any flash based drive.
Again, we do not know if your hard drive program is accurately reading the smart data at all. It may not be. But if it is you may want to look into whatever may be running on your (and your friends) system that can be causing so much writing.

Have a good weekend.

Bruce

Technical Support

****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

So I'm to believe the programs that I use to verify health levels/performance is not recommended nor supported and I'm supposed to accept that the drive(s) are degrading 1% every 90 days is nominal?! Seriously?


Welp, time for me to save my pocket change and get a replacement. There's a lesson here folks; you get what you pay for

 

[Tír na nÓg]

We should ask EVGA to launch some SSD and NVMe drives

 

[Nebulous]

I swear if EVGA comes out with a good SSD's & NVMe drives at an affordable price, I'll jump on it! I'm already looking into replacing this dam PNY POS. I know it's lifespan is short and it ain't going to last 2 years.

 

[Sentential]

PNY sadly has always crap when it comes to RMA, it was that way back in the 6800GT days and it still was when I had a set of GTX470s; good to see some things never change.

 

[Nebulous]

Yeah I remember. That happened to me with their memory and a 6800GT. There's a reason they're called "Penny". I shouldn't expect anything less.

 

[peanutbudder]

I had one encounter with PNY back when I needed to RMA my GTX 560ti and they were a freaking joke. I was constantly getting transferred from one representative to another about how to RMA my faulty card that would lock up at stock settings. I finally gave up and bought a HD7970 from ASUS. I spent a solid week getting the run around from PNY before I decided it wasn’t worth my time anymore. I have not bought a single product from them since 2012 and always discourage people from buying there products. I’m sorry to see not much has changed since my experience.

 

[Tech Tweaker]

For comparison my 2.5" Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD that's been in my main PC for around 2 months short of two years running Windows 7 is currently at 20.95 TB, and a second Samsung 850 Evo 500GB I have that's been running Windows 8.1 for about a month now is currently at 1.92 TB.

So, maybe I'm making writes faster to my drives than you are to yours going by the 8.1 drive's 1.92TB in one month (edit: it just went to 1.99 TB while I was writing this post). Perhaps because I also have most of my programs on my main OS drive (which in this case both of these SSD's are main OS drives), aside from most of my games which are on my WD Caviar Black storage drive (simply due to not having enough room for them on my main OS drives and my aversion to having a nearly full drive (the thinking that having a drive nearly full lowers its performance and/or slows it down)).

Only ever owned one PNY product that I'm aware of, a GTX 470 graphics card. Though it's possible that I might own a stick or two of memory from them, most of my stuff is G.SKILL, Corsair, Crucial/Ballistix, or OCZ, but I do have random sticks from other random brands (that I've mostly never even heard of).

 

[Alaric]

My 850 EVO 500 GB at 13/14 months shows 5.9 TB in the Samsung software, and my games are on the SSD, which get frequent and large updates (WoW, World of Warships and War Thunder). World of Warships especially, because the updater wipes files no longer needed with each update to keep the folder size down. All my programs are on my SSD with my OS. You guys are beating the crap out of your drives.

edit: I do have all my storage (Documents, videos, pictures, and downloads) on a separate HDD. Maybe that's the difference? I changed all those file paths in Windows to direct straight to the storage drive.

 

[Tech Tweaker]

My 850 EVO 500 GB at 13/14 months shows 5.9 TB in the Samsung software, and my games are on the SSD, which get frequent and large updates (WoW, World of Warships and War Thunder). World of Warships especially, because the updater wipes files no longer needed with each update to keep the folder size down. All my programs are on my SSD with my OS. You guys are beating the crap out of your drives.

edit: I do have all my storage (Documents, videos, pictures, and downloads) on a separate HDD. Maybe that's the difference? I changed all those file paths in Windows to direct straight to the storage drive.

I also keep nearly all of my documents, pictures and videos on a HDD, with a minimal amount of documents stored on the SSD (mainly just documents I've worked on recently and/or use frequently). But somehow still get around .95 TB of writes on the Win 7 SSD per month.

Could be because my paging file is based on the SSD's for each OS?

 

[Alaric]

I don't have a paging file. That could do it.

 

[||Console||]

9.978 tb of writes almost 2 years of uptime .
still 100% good status

View attachment 193749

 

[ITAngel]

Out of all the ssd I have owned, PNY was one that acted weird with my Ryzen system. Now I own a Samsung and it works perfect. I would avoid PNY drives as much as possible. Spend the extra for better hardware.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

9.978 tb of writes almost 2 years of uptime .
still 100% good status

View attachment 193749

System Drive, Cruxial MX100, 3 years old, 96% only but 4000+!
And SanDisk, once system drive, now media. Still 100%.
View attachment 193765View attachment 193766

 

[Alaric]

I'm still at 100% according to Adata SSD Toolbox and Sea Tools For Windows