SSD Health Question

[DaveLembke]

So my wifes computer that was running on this OCZ Agility SSD had a Windows 7 crash with data corruption causing Windows 7 to fail to boot. Removed this SSD and moved her over to the HDD that was in the system and so she is back up and running on Windows 7, but this SSD when checking into corruption with some tools left me sort of confused.

The confusion is that the tools I am testing this SSD with state 85% Healthy .... And a trial of SSD-Life states that the Drive is Excellent ... how is 85% of 100% excellent for health?

As well as if only 85% is healthy then.... shouldnt I be missing 15% of my drives capacity as for shouldnt it have shrunk with dead cells etc or is the reserved space allocated for lost cells great enough capacity to have relocated reserved cells to replace the dead ones without a capacity loss?

I ended up installing this SSD into my recent build where i wanted to make a power efficient workstation for surfing and flash games vs running my better faster power hungry systems. It seems to be behaving after a clean install of Windows XP Home SP3 to it, that is why the used capacity is so little in the one screenshot is because its XP Home SP3.

In the one screenshot I pointed out some problems detected with the drive using SSD-Life. Using Crystaldiskinfo it had issues reading the SSD and not sure if this is because the OS I am running is XP, but Crystaldiskinfo reported the 85% health initially with everything greyed out and thats when I looked for a different tool to assess the SSD's health.

Just added the crystal disk screenshot as I was typing this since pictures are better than words...

I know that this SSD probably shouldnt be trusted for anything critical for data and use, but the 85% just to me makes no sense and so maybe someone can explain why 85% is healthy and what 15% is missing etc or if this is some sort of health score instead of capacity etc.



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[Geek-9pm]

Statistics indicate any HDD is more likely to fail than  a SSD. But there are notable exceptions. A 15% failure is way out of bounds.
It has been said that the failure rate of a SDD is less that half that of a HDD over a period of a year. Failure means any failure that can not be corrected without data loss. The data lost might only be .01 % of the total, but it counts as a fatal failure.
Here is one of many articles that supports this idea.
hSSD Annual Failure Rates Around 1.5%, HDDs About 5%]ttp://hardware-beta.slashdot.org/story/13/09/12/2228217/ssd-annual-failure-rates-around-15-hdds-about-5]SSD Annual Failure Rates Around 1.5%, HDDs About 5%
A reader replied:

"So an SSDs not only outperforms, but on average outlast spinning disk."
This is completely unsubstantiated by the evidence provided

Anybody can go to Newegg or Amazon and read the reviews. More often people rant about SDD failures, not HDD failures. Is that not statistical proof?

[Calum]

85% health on SSD-Life does not indicate the drive has lost 15% of its capacity or that it's unhealthy, SSD-Life only gives you a best guess as to when the drive's erase cycles will be used up.  Essentially it's saying you've used 15% of the drive's lifespan and at your current rate, the drive would be unable to write any more data by November 9th 2023 - this only takes into account that one single indicator of health, nothing else.
Is the firmware up to date?  If not, update it, and then perform a secure erase, I usually do this by booting to the UBCD, loading Parted Magic which is a Linux live disk, then you have an option to erase disks and you can choose the built in secure erase function from there.  If your drive misbehaves after this, I would toss it or at least use it for something where you don't care about any data stored on it and you also don't care if it causes the system to crash or freeze up.

Useful link explaining some of the facts about SSD endurance - http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

[DaveLembke]

Ok , so with the info here in this pic, its nothing critical i guess?

I dont plan on using this SSD for anything that important anymore, mainly because I only like to use drives that dont show any negative stats in smart data for important use. Not to say that a totally healthy drive wont just crap out, but once damage is indicated in smart data, I tend to lose trust in the drive for anything mission critical. But I also use data protection practices as well so, I usually dont leave myself open for a single point of failure to have a total data loss as I have been bitten by many years ago with a drive crash due to loud music which had a bass drop that dropped the hard drive as the tower was under the desk a foot or so away from the  12" woofer. SSD's immune to vibration wouldnt have this issue, but just a reference to a learning experience to not have a single data storage location, but backups, and RAID when possible for anything critical.

I will check into the firmware update for that drive. Does a firmware update wipe the smart data clear like a hard reset or does the prior data stay intact? Reason why I am questioning this is because if I need to write down the prior start data stats prior to the wipe and flash to newer firmware I can write it on the outside of the drive for future reference, sort of like when changing an odometer out of a car that had 97,000 miles on it and 60,000 miles later on the new odometer you realize that it really has 157,000 miles on the vehicle and shouldnt be used/trusted for that cross country drive.

[Calum]

It's hard to say really, I would for sure monitor the drive though.

Updating the firmware will not clear the SMART data, no.

[DaveLembke]

ok thanks