hi, i bought ssd 5-6 months ago and today i wanted to check its health using 2 tools and i got 2 different results. it says : health : Good- 98 % (with Crystal disk info) and health : Acceptable -30 % (with HD Sentinel) So after viewing both of these results, i don't know what to think about this, which tool should i believe ? Is my SSD still in good helath or not ?
What brand name SSD? Some SSD manufacture's provide software for your SSD and gives you the health status. It's usually those "economy" drives that do not provide you with any software
A health status of a SSD which is shown by 'tools' is mostly based on one particular physical fact and then it is categorized / related to 'health'. There is no standard / specification for health. This is the reason why people can get very different results. I would not worry about health status. If you want info try to get useful data such as terabytes written (TBW) or even TBW / full disk space. Then compare it to the specifications of the manufacturer for this particular model and decide yourself how far your SSD is still away from reaching presumed EOL. Or even better forget it and use it. Make reasonable backups of your stored data and enjoy your SSD until it dies. Nobody can know about health. One just can assume the higher the wear the closer to EOL.
S.M.A.R.T info is for SSD drive & HDD drive I trust western digital. Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows, install and select the SSD, right click Show SMART drive info. HD Sentinel free version may not be accurate.
Thanks man, i feel a little bit better after reading your post. I forgot to mention that i don't have any problem using the ssd at this moment, i really feel that the ssd is still working fine as all the tasks i perform on my pc still run fast either at startup or while using my different apps. But i have to say that "crystal disk info" was really useful in the past. Before getting my ssd, i started to have problems when using my machine, suddenly everything became extremely slow, i could no longer do anything on the machine without rebooting the machine. So i wondered what coyld cause this even though i had my own view on the problem, i was thinking about the hard drive and using "crystal disk info" confirmed my fears as "Caution health" was displayed when running the tool, and that's when i decided to get an ssd to replace my old hdd, all this to say that these tools can be useful to check hard drive health status because at one point, you will have to use one of these tools to tell you if the problem is coming from the hard drive or not when the machine becomes slow when using it. What do you think ?
That's what I do, look at the SMART info and get TBW. I know it's about 150 for the drives I'm using. I think I'm still under 10 TBW on the two in my machine. When I get close to the manufacturers rating I'll replace them. That's actually fine because I'll want more drive capacity about then anyway. Those health indicators are all over the place, pretty useless to go by those.
@soukkar - There you go. All I can tell you is based on my own personal experience. About 5 years ago I bought a 120GB Crucial M500 SSD. Crucial claims the life expectancy is 72TBW. Right now I'm at 8.73 TBW, or about 12%. At that pace*, it will probably outlive me (I turned 67 years old earlier this month). EDIT: *Unless I live to be 100 or so.
you reach only 8,73 TBW when your ssd is 5 yo so that logically means that you didn't much use your SSD over the 5 last years.
I can post from my own experiences only. Tools about health status of either HDD or SSD are useless. My first HDD was a Quantum HDD. Its death has been indicated by system data loss (chkdsk jumped in) OS became unbootable. I reinstalled DOS / windows on it even though I knew the HDD has already some problems. Later then (3 weeks later) the HDD got noticeably louder and you could notice about tracking issues.... Finally I could not reformat it. The r/w heads were out of control. Another one (IBM) suddenly did not boot anymore and the FS got corrupted.... could never use it again. Tried the fridge trick but without any luck. Since I used Samsung Spinpoint HDDs I never have lost a HDD due to death anymore. Those Spinpoint HDDs are still working. I replaced them by either a larger HDD or SSDs. My oldest SSD (OCZ Vertex II) 100GB is still working. All of my 3 SSDs are still working... Firstly people talked about MTBF = Mean Time Between Failure. Then they talked about TBW (Tera Bytes Written). And nowadays they talk about DWPD (Diskful Writes Per Day). Well such values can be used to categorize / marketing aspects / advertising. AND their meaning is changing all the time! For instance: TBW. The same value for a smaller SSD would mean that their NANDS do last longer and hence are of a better quality. TBW do not contain time. And does not relate to total capacity. DWPD is a value which is not in context to common usage. Do people actually know how many times they use their full disk capacity per day in average? LOL. All the definitions are a sort of useless.....when it comes to health status. Their meaning is statistical and academical only. A cell gets actually 'used' when erased. Also when written. And a little when read... Nobody actually knows exactly when a device will die. My oldest SSD is 8 years old.
Yeah those lifetime ratings are not like drop dead limits. True for any electronic product really. I've had stuff last much longer and stuff last much shorter. Though usually with a good quality brand products outlive their rated life expectancy. It's more of a guarantee from the maker the device should last that long. In any case when it seems my drives have a lot of mileage on them I'll replace them, will probably happen anyway just for the sake of upgrading.
I once had a WD green 3TB HDD. Unfortunately the early batch had a fatal firmware. 'Intellipark'.... It caused constantly parking of the r/w heads all the time where there was still data r/w demand... Due to the huge amount of parking during r/w operation the heads died after 4 months already.....and the HDD became an useless brick. Lots of customers were screwed. Due to that misery WD decided that the brand WD green became WD blue (fixed FW now). LOL... I actually used that HDD for my backups (server), but that time I had to restore the backup-server itself. Means I had to do the backups again. I wanted to buy a Spinpoint HDD again. But that time Samsung had already given up their HDD manufacturing. Now I am running a WD Red (also as NAS) So my first impression of Western Digital was very bad.
I had one of those WD "Green" drives too.... did not like so I got rid of it asap. If your going to use the WD drives, get the "BlacK" or the "RE" drives. Do not waste your $$$ on those other WD drives. I've got a couple of those 3 tb WD Black drives and they have been running great for several years now, they are still in use right now.
i agree their garbage very slow 5400 RPM all they have is capacity their huge starting at 2TB and up...i believe the red label are a little better and super huge between 10-14 TB