Solved SSD Health?

Hi,

Is a 5% deterioration of my laptop's NVME SSD health in 16 months acceptable? (Btw- it's on 24/7)

At what level should I consider replacing it?

Thanks.

It's acceptable, i guess. SSDs are still new tech. Released for awhile now - but they keep releasing new versions - while competing for speed or a specific market target (lower quality ones becoming the low-end you see in almost every OEM laptop). Thus, some loose their life-span faster than others (apparently your model is more aggressive with the writes - if at 111 Tera is at 95% - while other models at 211 Tera are at 97%). It's even more ironic - that this happens with newer model (or maybe not - due to running at faster speeds - even 2x faster or more).

Based on personal experience - would check it more often when it drops below 60% - to see if it rests at a stable value - or keeps drooping rather fast (more in a week than in a whole year). Some seem stable even at 50% or less, while others are problematic when getting closer to 50%. A bit of a lottery - but above 70% wouldn't worry, tho - just to be safe - keep checking it once in awhile (like once every month or so). Most people won't do that tho (the consumer market is rather toxic this days - many discarding their systems/phones every few years - not really that interested in maintenance).

neves said:

It's acceptable, i guess. SSDs are still new tech. Released for awhile now - but they keep releasing new versions - while competing for speed or a specific market target (lower quality ones becoming the low-end you see in almost every OEM laptop). Thus, some loose their life-span faster than others (apparently your model is more aggressive with the writes - if at 111 Tera is at 95% - while other models at 211 Tera are at 97%). It's even more ironic - that this happens with newer model (or maybe not - due to running at faster speeds - even 2x faster or more).

Based on personal experience - would check it more often when it drops below 60% - to see if it rests at a stable value - or keeps drooping rather fast (more in a week than in a whole year). Some seem stable even at 50% or less, while others are problematic when getting closer to 50%. A bit of a lottery - but above 70% wouldn't worry, tho - just to be safe - keep checking it once in awhile (like once every month or so). Most people won't do that tho (the consumer market is rather toxic this days - many discarding their systems/phones every few years - not really that interested in maintenance).

Click to expand...

Thanks for the detailed explanation. (I'll keep an eye...)
Best regards!

Alexey2912 said:

Hi,

Is a 5% deterioration of my laptop's NVME SSD health in 16 months acceptable? (Btw- it's on 24/7)

At what level should I consider replacing it?

Thanks.

Click to expand...

@Alexey2912

Hi, I just replaced my WD SSD at 49% after 5 years.
There were no errors and it was working just fine, I just did not want to push it.
I am now still using it to store unimportant stuff.
So you have time!

OAT said:

@Alexey2912

Hi, I just replaced my WD SSD at 49% after 5 years.
There were no errors and it was working just fine, I just did not want to push it.
I am now still using it to store unimportant stuff.
So you have time!

Click to expand...

Thanks @OAT , for sharing your experience has given me a peace of mind.
Appreciated!!

Those numbers seem pretty much inline with what I am seeing, if I do some math.

You have a WD SN810 512GB drive which has a total endurance of 300TB.
I have a WD SN850 2TB which has a total endurance of 1,200TB written.

My drive is 4 years old, but is not on 24x7. I'm at 99% health on mine with 22,528 GB written. and 26,874 GB read. But I also have 4x the endurance since it's a larger capacity drive.



Generally speaking, I think you are safe to run it down to about 10% health remaining before getting a new drive in it. So, you have a very long time to go. Technically speaking, that's the total # of replace cells which are available, meaning that you should be able to go down to 0%, before you ever start loosing any write capacity to your drive.

I always recommended using the drive manufacturer tool in conjunction with crystal disk info as well for monitoring health etc.

Some manufactures tools offer overprovisioning with a one click easy apply to extend the lifespan of the drive.

In general, as others have stated, ssd's last a very long time.

At a rate of 5% every 16 months, it should last about 320 months, or 26.5 years before you hit 0.

Your SN810 drive has a specified write endurance of 500TB. You've written 11.107TB (11107GB), or 2.2% of that.

(Write endurance may be the strongest spec on SSD lifetime. Writing "wears" SSDs.)

My C: drive shows 62.75TB written, and it has an endurance of 1200TB. (It's a 2GB drive. Endurance scales with capacity.) That's over 5% of its write endurance used up, but CrystalDiskInfo shows 97% good.

I guess I have little understanding of what SMART uses to determine drive health.

Alexey2912 said:

Is a 5% deterioration of my laptop's NVME SSD health in 16 months acceptable?

Click to expand...

That's really for you to determine whether this is acceptable or not. But let's break this down: If you use 5% of the life every 16 months, it would be over 25 more years to get to zero.

Alexey2912 said:

At what level should I consider replacing it?

Click to expand...

In every wear test that I have ever seen, it seems like the drive can be taken well past 0% life left. In other words, the life expectency numbers seem to be very conservative - they guarantee operation to that point, but with plenty of headroom.

Personally, I have no problem taking it all the way to zero, so long as I have multiple reliable backups. Although, truth be told, in practical terms, I have never gotten anywhere near that. In fact, the lowest I have ever gotten so far is 80 some odd percent life left.

Should be still far above threshold.

my typical SDD data

INTEL/WDC/Samsung 95%-99% (1-5 yrs)
TOSHIBA 85%, far more than 5 yrs.

So far no any SSD die off in my hand.
my estimate is 2% every year. i.e. these SSD last about 50 yrs. much longer than my computer dispose time.

I had a 250gb ssd in my test rig, it was about 7 years old and was down to 5%. I replaced it but kept the drive just in case I needed it for a quick clean install to test another machine.

Cheers Freck

What is rarely understood is that the SSD write endurance is a nominal figure set by the ssd vendor. So the health figure is simply the number of writes divided by number of nominal writes.

Even if it reaches zero, it does not mean the drive is useless anymore. Indeed the writing metric can go as high as 256% i.e the drive could write up to 256% of nominal writes.

However the 256% is an artificial limir.

In truth, nobody knows how much can be written to an SSD before it bombs out - will it stop instantly, will it deteriorate gradually etc.

All the healh figure tells you is how close you are to the vendor nominal endurance limit.

You can be sure this limit is set artificially low so they never have to pay out on warranties e g. drive starts to fail in warranty period, and they "get out of jail" by saying you have written over the nominal limit.

It is a bit like car warranties which are baaed on 5 years or 60000 miles whichever cones first. The car is probably good for 120000 miles but they will not guarantee that of course.

So in the end, worrying over ssd health is pointless navel contemplation really.

The other important factor is drives can fail for many reasons other than write endurance e.g. the interface electronics crap out. Indeed, the risk of this is much higher than write endurance failure and can happen any time!

So one should always assume drive is going to fail at any time and make sure data etc is properly backed up.

"Is a 5% deterioration of my laptop's NVME SSD health in 16 months acceptable? (Btw- it's on 24/7)"

Yes, it's OK roughly what would be expected.

"At what level should I consider replacing it?"

That particular number from CrystaDiskInfo is based on what exactly ? presumably you can find out. I suspect it just the same as the SMART data based on percentage of the TBW endurance given by the manufacturer which is a nominal estimated value probably based on accelerated life testing.

You get somewhat lower numbers on QLC ssd designs.

For my Laptop's Micron SSD I use the Micron Storage Executive, it just says "Good health" it gives SMART data as well.
Based on the first years use, it should last another 40 years. What is more likely is some random failure before that.

However the more important indicators taken from the Micron Storage Executive manual are:

"Nearing Write Protect" (yellow) warning which is when the drive is approaching read only mode. Clearly it needs to be replaced.
Then:
"In write Protect" (Red) Oh dear ...

All my SSDs going back to 2012 show 100% health