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This is great info, thank you! Regarding SMART indicators, do you know if they're generally reliable? I seem to recall there have been drives (at least HDD, not

This is great info, thank you! Regarding SMART indicators, do you know if they're generally reliable? I seem to recall there have been drives (at least HDD, not sure about SSD) that didn't report correct numbers. In fact, I just checked and my current SSD doesn't report SMART data at all. Have they gotten better over the years?

wtallis 6y ago
I don't make a habit out of doing sanity checks on the SMART reporting of drives I test. My tests log that data, but I haven't written anything to parse that into useful information. I can't recall noticing obviously wrong or entirely missing SMART data in any drive I've recently tested. I'm curious what your SSD is and just how old it is, if it isn't giving you any SMART information. (Maybe you need to run `smartctl -s on` before it'll show you the stats it has probably been tracking all along?)
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  Ah I see. It's a PM981, from late 2017. Interestingly, the GSmartControl GUI says it doesn't support SMART. But now that I try smartctl -a, I see a bit of information, though not much. The only things regarding failures seem to be "Media and Data Integrity Errors" and "Error Information Log Entries" (which I'm not really sure how to interpret in terms of what's too high and what's too low). Other stuff is just temperature and other statistics. Not sure if I'm supposed to be seeing more, but I feel like hard disks used to report more than this!
  - wtallis 6y ago
    NVMe SSDs report a somewhat different set of indicators than SATA drives. If you want to estimate your own personal write endurance requirements, then you want to keep track of the line that looks like: Data Units Written: 67,509,873 [34.5 TB] Figure out how much that goes up in a typical day/week/month, and you'll know roughly how much you endurance you need. When your SSD is old and you want to monitor it for signs of impending failure, keep an eye on the lines: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% [...] Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 (Quoted stats taken from the 512GB PM981 I borrowed to test. It was barely used at the time.)
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      Ah I see, thank you, that makes sense. Sadly it seems this model doesn't publish an endurance specification at all, so it's hard to tell how close I am to its end of life. Interestingly mine actually already has some errors: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Media and Data Integrity Errors: 10 Error Information Log Entries: 735 but I guess that's probably normal? A least unless it fails suddenly/catastrophically.

wtallis 6y ago

I don't make a habit out of doing sanity checks on the SMART reporting of drives I test. My tests log that data, but I haven't written anything to parse that into useful information. I can't recall noticing obviously wrong or entirely missing SMART data in any drive I've recently tested. I'm curious what your SSD is and just how old it is, if it isn't giving you any SMART information. (Maybe you need to run `smartctl -s on` before it'll show you the stats it has probably been tracking all along?)

mehrdadn 6y ago
Ah I see. It's a PM981, from late 2017. Interestingly, the GSmartControl GUI says it doesn't support SMART. But now that I try smartctl -a, I see a bit of information, though not much. The only things regarding failures seem to be "Media and Data Integrity Errors" and "Error Information Log Entries" (which I'm not really sure how to interpret in terms of what's too high and what's too low). Other stuff is just temperature and other statistics. Not sure if I'm supposed to be seeing more, but I feel like hard disks used to report more than this!
- wtallis 6y ago
  NVMe SSDs report a somewhat different set of indicators than SATA drives. If you want to estimate your own personal write endurance requirements, then you want to keep track of the line that looks like: Data Units Written: 67,509,873 [34.5 TB] Figure out how much that goes up in a typical day/week/month, and you'll know roughly how much you endurance you need. When your SSD is old and you want to monitor it for signs of impending failure, keep an eye on the lines: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% [...] Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 (Quoted stats taken from the 512GB PM981 I borrowed to test. It was barely used at the time.)
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    Ah I see, thank you, that makes sense. Sadly it seems this model doesn't publish an endurance specification at all, so it's hard to tell how close I am to its end of life. Interestingly mine actually already has some errors: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Media and Data Integrity Errors: 10 Error Information Log Entries: 735 but I guess that's probably normal? A least unless it fails suddenly/catastrophically.