Question About NVMe SSD Health

Hello everyone. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

I have a concern, and maybe I am being a bit paranoid - which is likely. I have HWiNFO on my system. As I was reading through the sensor readouts, I noticed that my OS SSD (drive one listed under my system specs) is rated as having 81% life left to it according to the app. This made me a bit... nervous? Maybe that isn't the right word, but I've been thinking about it. Would you consider getting a new SSD to replace it with, or would you forget about it and go on using it?

Screenshot of HWiNFO is included.

For context, this is a new-to-me system I purchased off of eBay. I've had it for a few days now. Very fast, very responsive. Awesome little machine for what I do. I've always had really good luck with Dell systems. I have had two Latitude models and three Precisions now, and the quality has always been quite solid. My M4800 is still kicking. My mother uses it for Facebook, the internet, and Zoom sessions. I always go with a system that is three to four years old, as they can be had at good prices and still perform quite admirably as long as you aren't expecting them to run triple-A games at max resolution, which isn't what I bought this for. I use it mainly for some indie games from Steam, internet browsing, LibreOffice work, and occasionally for things at my job.

There is no need to replace that drive. Manufacturer rating are very pessimistic - they assume a worst case condition. In other words, they are guaranteeing that you have used up no more than 19% of the drive life, leaving 81% available, but typically the drive would last considerably longer in real life.

The bottom line is that unless something very unexpected happens, your drive should have a very long life ahead of it.

Also, you may be surprised at far that remaining 81% goes. Unless you are doing some mad amount of writing to that disk, it should last you many years. Keep an eye on it and I'll bet that you are surprised at how slowly that number goes down.

The drive specs: https://www.kioxia.com/content/dam/...asset/productbrief/cSSD-XG6-product-brief.pdf

Short version: it's spec'd with an endurance of 300TB (writes.) Hwinfo lists 37.9 tb. (I take it that the system was bought used. 37.9TB in a few days would be unusual.) That suggests you should be at 87%, not 81%, based on naive arithmetic.

Either way, you won't need to take any action for a very long time.

It can have a large amount of writes at first with a new install and adding programs etc, but settles down after that I've bought used laptops with nvme's and none of them has ever died on me!

Follow-up:

I ran some calculations. That drive is rated to be able to handle 3000 TB of writes during its lifetime. Since you are at 81% life remaining that brings us down to a guaranteed life of 2430 TB left to go. Just to put that into perspective and to put your mind at ease, if you wrote 1.33 TB of data to that drive EVERY SINGLE DAY it would take 5 years to use up the life of the drive. If you were to write 660 GB to the drive EVERY DAY that would give you a remaining life of over 10 years.

I hope that this helps!

EDIT: @bobkn, I see you responded while I was running the calculations . Sorry for the duplication (in part) of info.

hsehestedt said:

Follow-up:

I ran some calculations. That drive is rated to be able to handle 3000 TB of writes during its lifetime. Since you are at 81% life remaining that brings us down to a guaranteed life of 2430 TB left to go. Just to put that into perspective and to put your mind at ease, if you wrote 1.33 TB of data to that drive EVERY SINGLE DAY it would take 5 years to use up the life of the drive. If you were to write 660 GB to the drive EVERY DAY that would give you a remaining life of over 10 years.

I hope that this helps!

EDIT: @bobkn, I see you responded while I was running the calculations . Sorry for the duplication (in part) of info.

Click to expand...

But the endurance is spec'd at 300TB, not 3000.

bobkn said:

But the endurance is spec'd at 300TB, not 3000.

Click to expand...

Doh! Good catch. I'm really glad you caught that because that was a factor of 10x that I was off by. I hate giving out wildly inaccurate info!

That changes my numbers like this:

To get 5 years from now (assuming an 81% life left) you could write 133 GB per day or 66 GB per day for 10 years.

So, depending upon usage, that should still give you a really long life.

Also, the good news is that NVMe drives of 512 GB in size is ridiculously cheap these days.

TIP: When the time comes to replace the drive, consider a larger drive. Doubling the size also doubles the number of writes that can be performed in the lifetime of the drive so a 1 TB drive would have twice the number or allowable writes that a 512 GB drive would have.

The main thing is - backups. Then if anything ever dies, you don't lose your data.

Thanks for all the responses. It helped set my mind at ease. That is what I thought, but the reassurance is nice.

hsehestedt said:

There is no need to replace that drive. Manufacturer rating are very pessimistic - they assume a worst case condition. In other words, they are guaranteeing that you have used up no more than 19% of the drive life, leaving 81% available, but typically the drive would last considerably longer in real life.

The bottom line is that unless something very unexpected happens, your drive should have a very long life ahead of it.

Also, you may be surprised at far that remaining 81% goes. Unless you are doing some mad amount of writing to that disk, it should last you many years. Keep an eye on it and I'll bet that you are surprised at how slowly that number goes down.

Click to expand...

Good to know. Thanks for the info.

Hazel123 said:

The main thing is - backups. Then if anything ever dies, you don't lose your data.

Click to expand...

Already do make backups using Macrium Reflect Free at least once a week, sometimes more often if I make any big changes or install software. Good to have a reminder.

bobkn said:

Short version: it's spec'd with an endurance of 300TB (writes.) Hwinfo lists 37.9 tb.

Click to expand...

37.9 GB

Anibor_11 said:

37.9 GB

Click to expand...

37,911GB. About 37.9TB.

In terms of the life expectancy of the drive due to writes, 37.9GB is nearly zero.

300 TBW endurance quotation is typical of that sort and size of TLC drive.
That number is probably based on accelerated life tests, a life estimate not a hard limit.

The Health percentage is just a rather simplistic number of what is nominally left of that 300 TBW.
81% means that plenty of life in it yet, many years.