CrystalDisk Info - Optane drive shows 96% after about 9 months.

cereberus · Apr 10, 2022

As title says, crystaldiskinfo shows 96% for my optane drive, its health, which seems to be low but I do write a lot to drive.

So what does that mean - is this meaning 4% of disk's cells are kaput?

Or does it mean say each cell can be written on average 100 times (say), so now, the cells can only be written 96 times?

Does it mean something completely different?

At what point should I be considering a replacement?

By contrast, my wd 1tb nvme secondary drive is still at 100%.

On this basis, I am inclined to swap out optane for nvme (no optane drive) at some point.

The-Hive · Apr 10, 2022

Optane can be quite unreliable for monitoring, I read somewhere that you don't need to worry until it gets below 50% also find another program to double check it with. My other computer is on 89% it is 3 years old and the % has slowly dropped over time. I did once have a new pc and that disc failed after about 3 weeks, and I was given a warning at boot that catastrophic failure was immanent. I would be inclined to monitor it and keep an image ready to clone if need be.

Do you have a screen shot to show your total reads, writes and hours on

cereberus · Apr 10, 2022

The-Hive said:
Optane can be quite unreliable for monitoring, I read somewhere that you don't need to worry until it gets below 50% also find another program to double check it with. My other computer is on 89% it is 3 years old and the % has slowly dropped over time. I did once have a new pc and that disc failed after about 3 weeks, and I was given a warning at boot that catastrophic failure was immanent. I would be inclined to monitor it and keep an image ready to clone if need be.

I am not really that worried - I always have full Reflect backups in two other places.

89% after 3 years is more or less in line with my figures (slightly less but I do thrash the drives).

I was more trying to figure out what the figures mean - you read the web, and you get a lot of opinions but no real substance.

The-Hive · Apr 10, 2022

I know what you mean @cereberus
here is my Alienware ones, it is a couple of years old and gets a lot of use, this is the C drive

cereberus · Apr 10, 2022

There just seems to be no obvious logic to figures.

I am guessing % is probably just the actual writes / theoretical writes.
But if that was true, secondary drive should probably be say 99% or so?

I guess the point is they will stil outlive me though LOL.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Primary drive

This is the optane - i used to write all my vhds here hence high count, but I decided to get a second drive.

Those power on figures are complete nonsense.

Secondary Drive

This is my secondary drive - it is the large vhds that thrash the drive 17TB in about 6 months LOL.

hsehestedt · Apr 10, 2022

I had a whole writeup written but had to scrap it after I noticed your screenshot. That drive is a QLC SSD with an Optane cache. So the 96% life left is of the QLC cells, not the small Optane cache. Optane on its own has a far higher endurance rating than SLC / MLC / TLC / QLC SSD cells.

I didn't look up the full specs on your drive but by my math it probably has an endurance rating of about 600 TBW.

jimbo45 · Apr 10, 2022

I think the "Old School engineering " system of "MTBF" or Mean time before failure would be a lot more use than weird "%" failure rates

Cheers

jimbo

hsehestedt · Apr 10, 2022

I did a little more research just out of curiosity. I have not yet found the endurance rating spec for your drive, but for the Intel Optane 905P Series, only a 480 GB SSD the endurance rating is 8.76 PBW. If we calculate the fact that the cache in your drive is one fifteenth that size, assuming the same number of write cycles that gives us a TBW of about 584 (roughly). So that pretty much matches my calculation that your SSD likely has an endurance rating of around 600 TBW.

jimbo45 · Apr 10, 2022

hsehestedt said:
I did a little more research just out of curiosity. I have not yet found the endurance rating spec for your drive, but for the Intel Optane 905P Series, only a 480 GB SSD the endurance rating is 8.76 PBW. If we calculate the fact that the cache in your drive is one fifteenth that size, assuming the same number of write cycles that gives us a TBW of about 584 (roughly). So that pretty much matches my calculation that your SSD likely has an endurance rating of around 600 TBW.

Hi there

In plain English what does that actually mean -- I,E how long is that drive safe to use before it is of no longer value. That's why the old "MBTF" ratings were much better -- at least users had an idea of how long a piece of kit would be serviceable until it needed replacement.

All these new "modern" measurements are just pure Bovine Scatology obfuscating the real reliability of the equipment in question.

Cheers
jimbo

hsehestedt · Apr 10, 2022

jimbo45 said:
I think the "Old School engineering " system of "MTBF" or Mean time before failure would be a lot more use than weird "%" failure rates

Cheers

jimbo

SSDs do still have MTBF ratings but in the real world they are practically useless because the real world factor that most greatly impacts the endurance of an SSD (by a HUGE margin over anything and everything else) is the number of write cycles.

hsehestedt · Apr 10, 2022

jimbo45 said:
Hi there

In plain English what does that actually mean -- I,E how long is that drive safe to use before it is of no longer value. That's why the old "MBTF" ratings were much better -- at least users had an idea of how long a piece of kit would be serviceable until it needed replacement.

All these new "modern" measurements are just pure Bovine Scatology obfuscating the real reliability of the equipment in question.

Cheers
jimbo

It's extremely simple - assume a drive has an endurance rating of 100 TBW. BTW, that's an artificially low number, I'm simply using it as an example. If you have written 5TB of data to that drive then you have used 5% of it's expected life. It's literally that simple.

EDIT: The endurance ratings tend to be very conservative. You should easily be able to run the drive until it reaches 0%. An SSD will automatically lock itself into read only mode when it detects too many errors preventing you from using it beyond the point where there are no longer any reassignable blocks left.

jimbo45 · Apr 10, 2022

hsehestedt said:
SSDs do still have MTBF ratings but in the real world they are practically useless because the real world factor that most greatly impacts the endurance of an SSD (by a HUGE margin over anything and everything else) is the number of write cycles.

So what does that mean to a typical user who wants to know "How long will this wretched bit of kit last in my computer".

How many users on these boards have ever had an SSD fail - especially the later models, When the technology first came out years ago there may have been problems with read/write cycles etc - but those days are long gone. Most SSD's have a longer life cycle than classical "Spinners" now even when using a rapid duty cycle of switch on and off,

I'm still using a laptop with an old SSD fitted -- laptop 7 years old -- and the SSD which I regularly wipe, reformat and re-load various OS'es on it has never failed yet - and it must have had zillions of writes on it,

Cheers
jimbo

hsehestedt · Apr 10, 2022

Follow up: The very first SSD I looked up has an MTBF of 1.8 million hours that works out to over 205 years of time powered on. That's a lot longer MTBF than any human has

. That's why MTBF on a SSD is useless. The TBW rating is far more informative.

hsehestedt · Apr 10, 2022

jimbo45 said:
So what does that mean to a typical user who wants to know "How long will this wretched bit of kit last in my computer".

There is no 100% certain way to say how long it will last. I once purchased a new car where a rocker arm was not properly bolted down at the factory causing the engine to self destruct at under 1,000 miles. There are always outliers. But SSDs keep track of how much data has been written to them as the screenshots at the start of this thread attest so it's easy to monitor your warranted life expectancy.

Personally, I would probably replace the drive once you got down to near zero. But, naturally, I ALWAYS have backups to avoid those outlier conditions

Bree · Apr 10, 2022

cereberus said:
As title says, crystaldiskinfo shows 96% for my optane drive, its health, which seems to be low but I do write a lot to drive.

My Samsung 860 EVO SSD gets a lot of use too, its in a machine I use for VMs and I've written over 16TB to it in the past three years. If I keep up that rate it's going to take another 40+ years before I reach the manufacturer's specified 300TBW endurance. It will probably outlive me, let alone the PC it's installed in.

It really takes a lot to kill an SSD these days.

The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead

I never thought this whole tech journalism gig would turn me into a mass murderer. Yet here I am, with the blood of six SSDs on my hands, and that’s...

techreport.com

jimbo45 · Apr 10, 2022

hsehestedt said:
Follow up: The very first SSD I looked up has an MTBF of 1.8 million hours that works out to over 205 years of time powered on. That's a lot longer MTBF than any human has :). That's why MTBF on a SSD is useless. The TBW rating is far more informative.

Actually not -- that SSD would probably last the odd 200 years at the rate you were using it ("Poo Tin" from Russia permitting if no Nukes get involved in Europe these days) . Users don't need to worry these days any more about the reliability of SSD's for typical use or even with standard "Spinners" in a RAID 0 configuration.

Cheers
jimbo

PerpetualCycle · Apr 10, 2022

cereberus said:
There just seems to be no obvious logic to figures.

I am guessing % is probably just the actual writes / theoretical writes.
But if that was true, secondary drive should probably be say 99% or so?

I guess the point is they will stil outlive me though LOL.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Primary drive

This is the optane - i used to write all my vhds here hence high count, but I decided to get a second drive.

Those power on figures are complete nonsense.

View attachment 26616

Secondary Drive

This is my secondary drive - it is the large vhds that thrash the drive 17TB in about 6 months LOL.

View attachment 26615

Post an image with all of the individual values, not just the Health / Status.

Optane should not age like traditional SSD, they don't have erase cycles.
It may just be the authors haven't considered that and are misinterpreting. Or something else.

hsehestedt · Apr 11, 2022

geneo said:
Optane should not age like traditional SSD, they don't have erase cycles.

Incorrect. Just like standard SSDs, Optane memory still has a limited number of write cycles, however, the number of cycles is simply MUCH larger. This is why Optane memory still has a TBW rating. If it was truly unlimited, Optane memory would not have TBW or DWPD ratings.

cereberus · Apr 11, 2022

hsehestedt said:
Incorrect. Just like standard SSDs, Optane memory still has a limited number of write cycles, however, the number of cycles is simply MUCH larger. This is why Optane memory still has a TBW rating. If it was truly unlimited, Optane memory would not have TBW or DWPD ratings.

Well both the main drive and the optane cache drive show a similar reduction. I did some googling and guaranteed endurance is only 300 TBW. But on that basis, I should get up to 10 years but I seriously doubt laptop will last that long anyway as it runs quite hot at times. Besides I usually end up replacing after 5 years anyway.

I will post full output from program later today.

cereberus · Apr 11, 2022

Here we go.

Clearly 96% is item 3 minus item 5.
What is interesting is cache memory has no threshold - I take that to mean that even if cache failed, memory would still work - I presume it auto turns off the cache.

I have no idea what the composite temperature means unless in deg Kelvin LOL.

I cannot see anything obvious to be concerned about.

cheers

C.

MAIN DRIVE

Quoted endurance 300 TBW

OPTANE CACHE DRIVE

Secondary Drive

Quoted endurance 600 TBW

CrystalDisk Info - Optane drive shows 96% after about 9 months.

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