[ale] OT SSD remaining lifetime indicator

gcs8 gcsviii at gmail.com
Sat Sep 8 11:41:35 EDT 2012


my SSD. see attached picture.

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:42 PM, Lawrence Hamblin <infinity.d2 at gmail.com>wrote:

> I tried this out earlier, and it wasn't able to give me an estimate of my
> drive's lifetime because, apparently, it doesn't report that statistic.  It
> did, however, say that my drive was healthy.  I'm running Windows 7 Pro
> 64-bit on a 128GB Samsung 830 SSD, which has been rock solid for the past
> nine months since I bought it.  I'm upgrading to a 512GB model soon.
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 4:32 PM, David Tomaschik <david at systemoverlord.com>wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 7:02 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE)
>> <atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:
>> > Hi guys,
>> >
>> > I was doing research on SSD's and ran across this. It's an SSD remaining
>> > lifetime indicator. It monitors your ssd's and indicates their health
>> as a
>> > percentage from 0 - 100%. It also gives an estimated end of life date
>> which
>> > continually updates based on your usage of the drive. It does all this
>> by
>> > monitoring the SMART data from the drive and the number of write
>> cycles. I
>> > don't know anything about it other than what's on the website, but it
>> looks
>> > pretty cool. Unfortunately for this group, it's a Windows program.
>> However,
>> > it might be possible to run it under Wine or find something that does
>> the
>> > same thing in Linux. According to the website, when the drive's life has
>> > expired, it becomes a read only device, like a giant dvd rom. The data
>> > SHOULD still be there and remain readable. How long it remains
>> readable, I
>> > have no idea.
>> >
>> > http://www.ssd-life.com/
>> >
>> > Sincerely,
>> >
>> > Ron
>>
>>
>> It most likely won't work under wine as getting that data from the
>> drive requires sending raw device commands (ioctls on Linux) and I
>> don't think wine provides an emulation layer for this.  (It might, but
>> the use cases would be pretty limited.)
>>
>> My understanding is that smartmontools (at least as of 5.40) supports
>> SSD wear level indication.  Basically, the drive can report what % of
>> its spare blocks are still available.  Read (and record) that over
>> time, extrapolate, and there's your wear leveling limit.
>>
>> That being said, most SSDs that die don't die because they've hit
>> their write cycle limit.  I've personally seen a couple die due to
>> controller failures, and those drives *completely disappear* from the
>> system.
>>
>> I operate as if my drive will fail any second.  I have an extensive
>> set of backups, and that's how I plan to preserve my data, not by
>> trying to guess when a drive will fail.  (Or be stolen.)
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Tomaschik
>> OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B
>> http://systemoverlord.com
>> david at systemoverlord.com
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>
>
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-- 
Charles Selfridge

PBYC  IT director

(404) 910-3409
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