I have been using a 1 TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD for almost three years now and it is showing a health status of "Good 93%" in CrystalDiskInfo v8.7.0. This after almost 18,000 hours use and 62 TB of total host writes. This drive is used as an internal boot drive for Windows so has gone through numerous updates and game installs. That sounds good and normal, right? Well, I purchased a 1 TB Samsung 860 QVO SSD on Friday from Amazon along with an external disk caddy to install Steam games. It is plugged into the front USB 3.0 port on my case and only two games are installed on it: Horizon Zero Dawn and F1 2019 (done as a test). Nothing else is installed on this drive as yet. However, CrystalDiskInfo v8.7.0 shows the drive has been used for 40 hours with 482 GB of total host writes but the health status is "Good 99%". Why is this drive showing a 1% life time degradation after just one day? At this rate it'll be at 0% after 100 days!!! It took years before my Samsung 850 EVO boot SSD's health status even dropped from 100% to 99%. Is the Samsung 860 QVO drive defective? I am sure the drive's health status was "Good 100%" when I checked it on Friday after installing Horizon Zero Dawn on it.
I did some more research on this and it seems some SSDs can go from 100% to 99% straight away then stay at 99% for months before dropping again. I think this is what has happened here. The weird thing is that it was almost 18 months before my Samsung 850 EVO internal 1 TB SSD went from 100% to 99% and that is a system boot drive that I also install games to. I figured that was a sign of the drives longevity that it only dropped 1% in 18 months so I was shocked to see a brand new drive drop 1% with less than 500 GB of writes. Thanks for the replies.