Crystal Disk Alert

Hi.

I would cleanly uninstall the version which you have and install the newest one 8.16.4 (if this isn't.)
Run it again and report back.

Thanks.

OldGuyFromCdn said:

Silly question maybe but thought I'd ask.

I've had Crystal Disk for some time and today was the first time it's played the alert sound. Everything looks good but health status had changed from 99% to 98%. Would that change have triggered it?

It took me a while to understand what this means. It does not mean drive has lost 2% of its capacity. It just means you have written (nominally) 2% of its lifetime of data.

Every SSD has a "vendor quoted" maximum number of writes (in practice, this is quite conservatively low to avoid warranty claims).

So (numbers here are fictitious to show principle) if drive was quoted to have a maximum number of writes of 1000 Terabytes, 98% means you still have 980 terabytes to go in effect. The counters only work to nearest percent, so it goes 99, 98, 97, every time an additional 10 terabytes are written.

In fact, even if you get to zero, count can go as high as -256%. This just means drive has a much longer write resilience than the vendors quote (to avoid warranty claims as I said).

So in simple term, it just means you have a huge amount of life yet. I use a huge amount of writes on one nvme drive, and in 1 year, it has only dropped 1%. On that basis it will last theoretically 100 years (at least 80 more than me LOL).

So, there is nothing to worry about - this is quite normal. It will sit at 98% now for a while then flip to 97% (it would be nice if it showed % to 1 decimal place).

I cannot say how low it should go before you need to think about replacing drive, but all info I have seen suggests you can go well below 50%. So if it took 1 year to get to 98%, drive has 25 years to get to 50%. In 25 years, technology will have changed and an NVME drive will only be used by Fred Flintstone.

The actual truth is nowadays, ssds are just as reliable as hdds - the more likely "instant" failure is the interface electronics - that can happen on a new drive even.

OldGuyFromCdn said:

Silly question maybe but thought I'd ask.?

No, not silly at all.

As @cereberus said, it's nothing to worry about. You have just crossed the threshold of having used 2% of Samsung's specified endurance for this SSD.

I have the same SSD, and can tell you that the maufacturer's specified endurance for this drive is 300TBW (terabytes written). I hammer this SSD hard, running multiple VMs on it. At 16.5 terabytes written mine is now down to 97%. At my current rate of usage I calculate it will still take me 40+ years to get this down to 0%.



Wear Leveling Count is not an indicator of the drive failing any time soon. The one to keep an eye on is the raw value for 05 Reallocated Sector Count. A non-zero value here means that one ore more cells have died and been replaced by ones from a pool of spares. If/when that happens it's time to start looking at replacing the SSD.

But it really won't happen for a long time, SSDs are tougher than you may think....

The SSD Endurance Experiment: They’re all dead
I never thought this whole tech journalism gig would turn me into a mass murderer. Yet here I am, with the blood of six SSDs on my hands, and that’s not even the half of it. You see, these were not crimes of passion or rage, nor were they products of accident. More than 18 months ago, I vowed to push all six drives to their bitter ends. I didn’t do so in the name of god or country or even self-defense, either. I did it just to watch them die.

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

Just a footntote;

If you should buy or build a PC, always get the SSD with the largest capacity in your budget, not lower than 1 TB.
The HDD days are indeed over (IMHO) for mainstream storage.

Just how do you think they build these ultra-thin laptops anyway?

Bree said:

No, not silly at all.

As @cereberus said, it's nothing to worry about. You have just crossed the threshold of having used 2% of Samsung's specified endurance for this SSD.

I have the same SSD, and can tell you that the maufacturer's specified endurance for this drive is 300TBW (terabytes written). I hammer this SSD hard, running multiple VMs on it. At 16.5 terabytes written mine is now down to 97%. At my current rate of usage I calculate it will still take me 40+ years to get this down to 0%.



Wear Leveling Count is not an indicator of the drive failing any time soon. The one to keep an eye on is the raw value for 05 Reallocated Sector Count. A non-zero value here means that one ore more cells have died and been replaced by ones from a pool of spares. If/when that happens it's time to start looking at replacing the SSD.

But it really won't happen for a long time, SSDs are tougher than you may think....

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

The SMART attributes from NVME drives are rather different. Number 5 is simply the percentage of vendor endurance.
I cannot see any equivalent of sector allocated count. Does this mean NVMEs do not suffer retired blocks same way as conventional ssd?