Samsung's fastest consumer SSD has a different endurance rating in other countries — TBW listing could be a typo, though

When you buy an SSD, you look at the drive's performance and endurance. Apparently, Samsung's 990 Pro , one of the best SSDs , has different endurance ratings depending on the country, as noticed by a member of a Polish hardware forum . However, it could be a typo.

From a performance point of view, all of Samsung's 990 Pro SSDs sold worldwide are similar. They promise up to 7,450 MB/s sequential read speed and 6,900 MB/s sequential write speed, making them some of the best PCIe Gen4 SSDs available today. These are all based on the Pascal controller and 176-layer V-NAND memory, based on specifications noted on Samsung's websites, but there are differences.

For a 990 Pro 4TB drive, Samsung promises 2,400 terabytes to be written (TBW) rating in the U.S., U.K., and Estonia. However, this is not the case in Poland, which is not far from Estonia, where the TBW rating for a 990 Pro 4 TB drive is 1,200 TBW. It could be a typo, as the TBW for a 2 TB drive is the same 1,200 terabytes. The drives are certified to function in the same operating conditions in different countries — 0 - 70 degrees Celsius — so we are probably not dealing with various types of memory with lower endurance in certain operating conditions.

Why a Samsung scale company offers different TBW ratings for the same products in other countries is something to ask Samsung about. From a technology standpoint, you reduce TBW rating because you switch to a different controller, a different type of memory, or different operating conditions, primarily temperature. However, humidity and air pressure can also affect how electronic components work.

Electronics tend to overheat in countries with warm climates (and it was a concern for Intel's Pentium 4 'Prescott' in Latin America some 20 years ago when high-end all-in-one coolers were not widespread), so different TBW ratings for a drive sold in such a country is a thing to expect. I visited Samsung's Brazilian website only to find out that the company's 990 Pro 4 TB SSD has the same TBW rating as its counterparts in other countries, which almost certainly means that we are dealing with a typo with the TBW rating in Poland.