SSD Health Status

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O/S:  Windows 10 Professional (1909)
SSD:  Sansung PM830 128GB

Hello to All!

I am hoping to get some advice on a bit of a conundrum I am experiencing with the health of my SSD.

I check my SSD roughly monthly with CrystalDiskInfo and upto & including version 8.5.0 x64 showed my drive’s health status as: Good – 94%.

A recent update of CrytsalDiskInfo to version 8.7.0 x64 and it now shows as: Good – 59%.

Based on such a percentage change, I explored a bit further using Open Hardware Monitor (0.9.5) and this shows a ‘remaining life’ of 94%.

I checked again today using both versions of CrystalDiskInfo and each comes up with a different percentage?!  I also used the CMD: wmic diskdrive get model,status which only shows a status of OK.

Can anyone shed any light on this issue as any advice would be greatly appreciated – thank you.

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Why not use Samsung Magician to test?

SMART is the way health is reported but there is no standard, so SSD manufacturers use different figures to mean different things. CDI have probably updated the interpretation for Samsung drives.

How old is the drive?
How much data written (host writes)?

cheers, Paul

p.s. I have CrystalDiskInfo resident so it will inform me if there are issues. No need to remember to test.

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Thanks Paul T for your response.

Apologies, but I should have mentioned trying Samsung Magician but ridiculously, it returned no information about the drive!  Technically though, my drive is not listed as supported – certainly not on the current version 6.

Power On Hours: 51691 and Host Writes: 23262GB.

Also tried today:

• Hard Disk Sentinel reports: 59% – Fair.
• HDDSCan reports Wear Levelling Count of: 059 (which I’m guessing relates to the percentage).

What really peaked my curiosity was the fact that CDI reduced suddenly by 35%.

Tony

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Its been rewritten roughly 181 times so far, powered on for nearly 6 years…

What would worry me is how its used… if its mostly full and does a lot of rewrites, then the same area’s of the drive are getting hit a lot more than they should. reducing the life of the drive a lot quicker…

Is this used as a Cache Drive?

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CrystalDiskInfo 8.7.0 probably changed how the app interpret old SSDs S.M.A.R.T. data.

You can ask for explanation at https://github.com/hiyohiyo/crystaldiskinfo/

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Thanks Alex5723.

Looks like I would have to register to report an issue, so I might drop a line via email to clarify the sudden percentage drop.

Tony

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I think it’s time to get a new SSD if two apps tell you it’s on the way out and even the manufacturer doesn’t support it.

Don’t put it off unless you have regular image backups – even then I’d be doing it ASAP.

cheers, Paul

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Just thought I would drop a further comment with the response that I received from CrystalDiskInfo (courtesy of Hiyohiyo) on enquiring about the sudden percentage reduction on my SSD as follows:

Life attribute is changed from 0xB3/0xB4 to 0xB1 for Samsung SSDs.

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/crystaldiskinfo-history/

0xB3: Used Reserved Block Count (Total)
0xB4: Unused Reserved Block Count (Total)
0xB1: Wear Leveling Count

On further research, this is now starting to go beyond my personal IT knowledge which I have no problem admitting to!

In summary; the SSD is quite old and no longer supported by Samsung – certainly with regards to their Samsung Magician software.  I will continue to monitor the situation, along with ensuring I have regular backups and look to change the drive or maybe… this is a hint, that I should start building that custom PC I have been puting off for ages!!

Thanks once again, Paul T and Alex5723 for your input.

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[Ascaris]

I have several Samsung SSDs, so I took a look at their SMART stats to compare them to yours.

My 850 Evo has a raw wear-leveling count value of 29, but the normalized value is 98, for 98 percent of the rated life remaining.

My 840 Pro has a raw wear-leveling count of 1167, normalized 68, for 68% remaining.

I don’t know how the programs arrive at their overall health status, but the normalized value of SMART attribute 177, wear leveling count, is the percentage of rated life left in the NAND cells. Edit: I see now that the author of one of the programs has said that the drive life is now based on 0xB1, wear leveling count, instead of some others.  0xB1 in hex is 177 in decimal, so it is the attribute I was referring to above.  I would agree that this is a more fitting estimate of the drive’s remaining rated life. I’d keep using it at 59% if it were mine.

SSDs have a rated number of write cycles they can endure, but reaching that point doesn’t mean the NAND cells are actually dead. A Samsung 840 Pro was the torture test champion in TechReport’s torture test, where they wrote to the drives continuously until they failed. The drive made it to about 2 petabytes before it failed (2,000 TB)! It was rated for far less life than that.

If the drive has had uncorrectable errors (attribute 187), that means there was a hard failure in one or more NAND cells that could not be recovered. The bad block total, attribute 183, tells the number of cells that the drive was not able to read as easily as it would have liked, and so those cells were removed from service, with the data intact. A lot of the drives had a steady but slow increase in these over time, and as long as no data was lost, it’s no cause for alarm if you have a few.

As always, it is best to have backups for any drive that you would be upset about if it lost its data. Not just SSDs, but all drives.  I’ve had a number of traditional rust spinner drives suddenly die without warning, from SMART giving them a clean bill of health to deader than a doornail in an instant, and others died more gradually, with the bad sectors piling on faster and faster (a really bad sign).  I’ve not yet had a SSD fail. My oldest is the 840, with about 35,000 power-on hours… not as old as yours!

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/16GB & GTX1660ti, KDE Neon
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, KDE Neon

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Ascaris.

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The other figure to keep an eye on is the “reallocated sector count” If that increments by more than one or two a month your disk is heading for silicon heaven.

cheers, Paul

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Thanks Ascaris for the detailed information – always happy to further my knowledge!

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