SSD Media Wearout Indicator at 10%, is drive still safe to use?

Bree · 24 Mar 2021

Ocman76 said:

I have a 180GB Intel SSD which I pulled from an old laptop (around 2014 I believe). The drive health is shown in crystaldiskinfo as 10% which seems to be coming directly from the Media Wearout Indicator:...

...The Total Nand Writes is 223 TB. Is this drive getting close to end of life? Is it still safe to use?

If you want to find out more about SSD failure modes when pushed to the limit, then read this...

The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead - The Tech Report

It makes an interesting comment about Intel SSDs, in that they are designed to shut themselves down when they exceed their specified writes. As these specs are a little conservative, then it is likely be reliable until the wear drops to 1, after which it will switch to 'read-only' mode. I'd expect yours to be completely reliable until one day you can no longer write to it.

Intel’s 335 Series failed much earlier, though to be fair, it pulled the trigger itself. The drive’s media wear indicator ran out shortly after 700TB, signaling that the NAND’s write tolerance had been exceeded. Intel doesn’t have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 Series is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself when the power is cycled.

...and is confirmed here by Intel.

Intel said:

Solid-state drives may enter into a locked read-only mode once the over-provisioned space depletes and the drive exceeds its lifetime writes. The Media Wear-Out Indicator under the SMART attribute E9 measures lifetime writes.

Note

The Limited Warranties for Intel® Solid State Drives defines the warranty period as whichever comes first: five years from date of purchase (depending on model) or once the SMART attribute E9 reaches the normalized value of one. This value starts out at 100 on brand new, unused drives.

SSD is in Locked Read-Only Mode

Ocman76 · 24 Mar 2021

Run: Macrorit partition expert > Disk Surface Test (run overnight) > post images into the thread

Same results as HD Tune:

SSD Media Wearout Indicator at 10%, is drive still safe to use?-macroit.png

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Steve C said:

What does Intel's SSD utility report? See Download Intel(R) Memory and Storage Tool (GUI)

Same as crystaldiskinfo it looks like:

SSD Media Wearout Indicator at 10%, is drive still safe to use?-intel-storage.png

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sdowney717 said:

Replace or backup frequently. if you can install 2 drives, clone to the second new one and dual boot the potentially failing drive till it dies. When it dies, switch to booting the second new drive in the PC

I'm planning on using this drive with a few other SSD's as a cache for a server. The cache will only temporarily hold files before moving them to the main data storage drives so if the drive fails at any time its fortunately not a problem for me.

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Bree said:

If you want to find out more about SSD failure modes when pushed to the limit, then read this...

This is really interesting info. I'm going to go ahead and keep using this drive until it dies.

zbook · 24 Mar 2021

Run HD Tune benchmark again to see whether it completes or displays read errors.

If it errors then test with other benchmark software: atto, crystal disk mark
Disk Benchmark for Windows Software | ATTO
CrystalDiskMark – Crystal Dew World

Run HD Sentinel: (free or trial edition)
Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring
Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring
For each drive post images of these tabs into the thread:
Overview tab
Temperature
SMART
Disk performance

Take Screenshot in Windows 10 Windows 10 General Tips Tutorials
Take Screenshot in Windows 10

NavyLCDR · 25 Mar 2021

Just realize that running all these disk surface test programs are causing useless writes to the SSDs. SSD don't suffer from bad sectors the same way HDDs do. When the firmware of the SSD detects a bad cell, it will lock that cell out and insert a cell from the built in overprovisioning to replace it. So the programs designed to detect bad sectors in hard drives are only going to write more data to the SSD, shortening its life.