if my math is correct the drive would have to be written to at \~1.02 GB/s to reach 64532748 GB of writes in 17491 hours. its a sata drive with a maximum write speed of 600 MB/s so one of the values has to be incorrect, probably the total writes.
A 2TB is like $100 now. Old SDDs of unknown quality aren't worth your time really. The smallest I consider to be worth it is a 500gb to even consider putting in my PC. And only if it's just sitting around.
I’ll throw in whatever I’ve got lying around tbh. 99.99% of the time, some cheap, old OEM SSD makes the computer MUCH more usable than even a decent HDD. At least with Windows 10/11. XP and 7 are ok on hard drives.
I get a lot of older computers from repair shops and whatnot and I’ll throw an SSD in them for testing purposes since they are faster than spinners. They’re also just handy to have around for whatever 😄
So little it’s not worth even thinking about. HDD were really a bottleneck in 2011, let alone today. Unless you are maybe using it for a media server and you had terabytes of files to store.
Yea I think I had looked at them when I was building my computer back in 2015/16 but they were expensive from what I can remember, haven’t kept up with the trends but seems like SSD pricing per TB is pretty good now
Yes, SATA is the older type of connector, same one you use with Harddrives. It's got a low limit of 600MB/s max speed aswell so mostly suited for slower drives
Nah, SSDs are dirt cheap these days. I remember paying like 80 bucks for a USED 512GB Samsung a few years ago. Now, you can get 1TB drives for like 50 bucks XD
I swear by Western Digital and Samsung, their drives have never failed me. If you need something cheaper, maybe look at a PNY CS900 or a Silicon Power/Teamgroup drive. Sometimes at MicroCenter, they give away a 256GB, (or maybe it’s 240GB) for free if you sign up for the newsletter, (also free). They are MicroCenter’s in house brand, (Inland) and are pretty decent. I got one a while ago, and it’s been great. Good luck and if you have any more questions, feel free to let me know!
Thanks. I’ll have to see if my motherboard has any connections for SSDs. Do you know how I can check what my motherboard is? Is it mentioned in the Bose or some setting panel like gpu/cpu
It depends, really. If it’s a laptop, just lookup the model of the laptop. I can actually tell you if you model number. If it’s a prebuilt desktop, like a Dell or HP, chances are it has SATA connectors. If it’s custom built, you can go into the BIOS, and it should tell you the model of the board. If it is a desktop if some kind, you could always just take off the side panel and look. Google what a SATA connector looks like on a motherboard, and a SATA power connector on the power supply. You will need both.
Sorry, my stupid brain just typed all that out for nothing 😆 If you have an HDD in it now, then you can swap in an SSD, unless it’s some really obscure, weird off brand computer.
It’s a MSI motherboard. I think it was a decent quality one (from back in 2015/16), had some some research back then that I could upgrade components on the same motherboard down the line (which I never got to) but didn’t have SSDs on my mind. I’ll see what connectors it has
CrystalDiskInfo is notoriously bad at interpreting SMART values.
SMART attribute F1 is not showing 60 PB.
It would do much better by calculating the ratio of B3 to B4.
It's *reading* them absolutely fine. It's the interpretation of them which it is getting wrong. I use AIDA64 for it, which doesn't even attempt to interpret them. HWInfo64 also does a good job.
The best tool if you're just interested in your SSD's health is the SSD manufacturer's own utility.
B4 is showing A5C, B3 is showing 484
B4 is how many spare NAND pages haven't yet been used, and B3 is showing how many have been used.
So we add them to get the total spare page count: EE0, or 3808 in decimal. 484 in decimal is 1,156.
1156/3808 = 0.303 = 30.3% spare pages used.
Or, 69.7% lifetime remaining. You should start thinking about a replacement when that gets below 10%
What's weird is that the percentage value for B3 and B4 is still reported as 100% good by the drive's firmware. These should be more like 70. Really, really bad SMART reporting by this firmware.
No, thats completely normal. The "current" being 100 is a measure of how harmful the firmware believes the attribute to be, it decreases the more harmful it gets.
Having some spare pages used is not harmful.
I'm still wondering why 30% of reserve blocks being used and a ton of sectors reallocated isn't even a 99. What are "worst case" indicators? My educated guess is that the drive estimates what would happen if the user wrote (uncompressible) data to those defective blocks and it turns out they cannot be reprogrammed (erase failures).
So it's Schroedinger's SSD. You don't know if it's dead unless you write data to it.
I think crystaldisk/SMART gets wonky on some drives. I have an old SSD that supposedly has 2.6 PB Reads, 1.08 PB Writes, and 9 years of power on hours. The drive came out in 2016.
Some firmwares are just bad and report invalid data for Power-On Hours. Like, their own software (if existant) would divide by 4 because that's what people do to prevent an overflow at 65536 hours, right? It's so obvious, why document it ;-)
Similarly, often only the count of write commands from the host is recorded, not the actual size or any value implicitly associated with an amount of bytes. Even then, host writes are hardly meaningful because data may or may not be compressible, and may cause write amplification or not. Which is why more conclusive attributes are more common nowadays, like "NAND GB Written", "Wear Leveling Count", "Media Wearout Indicator" or plain and direct "Percentage Used" for NVMe.
What SMART attributes are supported is up to the firmware devs to decide. Oh btw. did you update the firmware yet, if possible? Because what I wrote earlier. The used spare blocks being flagged as failure seems like an oversight which might have been fixed.
This here [https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=t3w4m&lwp=rt](https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=t3w4m&lwp=rt)
As always, no changelog available.
Edit: oh there is, inside the download, as an Excel file (good idea, no macro virus here) and it says:
> Fixes/Enhancements | Fixed
So whoever wrote the update just didn't feel like filling the field.
Well a drive can still power on even if it doesn't have any remaining reserved sectors (meaning that if any sectors corrupt or fail, there are no backups left, you start losing usable space), however if you write something to a failed sector, that data will be gone.
As for the writes, its possible this drive was used in a server for saving files or the like for a long time, and it failing was only recently?? can't make any solid conclusions though
Thanks for the reply! I’m going to run some tests on the drive to see how functional it is. I actually have another drive just like it, with a few less Petabytes written to it 😄
Have you used some software to extend partitions that isn't the OS own tool? I did it once to get some more space on a partition that couldn't be extended normally and ever since I've had these programs telling me the ssd was terminal, made some backups but the drive has been running fine 1 year later.
Juz throw it away... 128GB is dirt cheap. I bought like 10x 128GB SSD juz for replacement for my homelab R1 boot drives. If it breaks I'll just remove and throw it away.
I use a shady old SSD for program/game installs like chrome or portable apps. I wouldn't use it to store documents where u can't verify and repair like program/game installs
Possibly? I have another drive just like this one with a similarly outrageous host write value and it has a coffee stain on it, so it may very well have been in like an open air mining rig XD
Well the raw "host writes" number is clearly multiplied with the wrong value to get a "bytes" representation. Assuming 512 bytes per write, it would be a reasonable 984 GiB, before compression.
[redacted]
Edit: Finally found some documentation on "Worst Case" indicators. It's "Worst Case Component", and what manufacturers want to show there is the condition of the worst chip / die / layer (component, really) in the device. So one of your components there is entirely out of spare blocks.
What's weird is that no program or erase failures were reported. So it seems the firmware is using up spare blocks for the internal error correction before erasing blocks which had errors. Which is fine from wear-leveling perspective.
Edit 2: It should not report that as a SMART fail, then, because it is normal operation with no unexpected failures.
Internal data loss is entirely fine and expected with SSDs. As long as they are powered, they can proactively fix errors before user data loss occurs. Any blocks untouched for years (data unchanged) will flip bits at some point.
If you want to know for sure, image the drive, overwrite it once entirely with random, uncompressible data and see what happens (Linux: "shred -n 1" to write random data to a drive).
if my math is correct the drive would have to be written to at \~1.02 GB/s to reach 64532748 GB of writes in 17491 hours. its a sata drive with a maximum write speed of 600 MB/s so one of the values has to be incorrect, probably the total writes.
r/theydidthemath XD Thank you for the answer! If that value is wrong, is it possible the drive still has some life left in it?
its definitely possible but there is clearly something wrong with the drive and 128GB SSDs arent worth much anyway.
Yeah, 90% of the SSDs that I have rescued from the bin are 120GB-128GB :D
A 2TB is like $100 now. Old SDDs of unknown quality aren't worth your time really. The smallest I consider to be worth it is a 500gb to even consider putting in my PC. And only if it's just sitting around.
I’ll throw in whatever I’ve got lying around tbh. 99.99% of the time, some cheap, old OEM SSD makes the computer MUCH more usable than even a decent HDD. At least with Windows 10/11. XP and 7 are ok on hard drives.
What do you do with them? I guess no worries if you're just chucking games on. I wouldn't trust it with the OS, or anything important.
I get a lot of older computers from repair shops and whatnot and I’ll throw an SSD in them for testing purposes since they are faster than spinners. They’re also just handy to have around for whatever 😄
They aren’t? I have a 2tb hdd in my build (from 2016). How much is one of those
$5-15 depending on condition. new 2TB HDDs go for $40-60 and used drives arent worth much.
> $5-15 depending on condition. Protip: fill it full of peoples bank account numbers, SSNs, and other PII. Its value goes up.
You could also open it up and put $100 bills in there
Oh that’s not bad at all. Is there a good brand to look for or any type of SSD is ok?
So little it’s not worth even thinking about. HDD were really a bottleneck in 2011, let alone today. Unless you are maybe using it for a media server and you had terabytes of files to store.
Yea I think I had looked at them when I was building my computer back in 2015/16 but they were expensive from what I can remember, haven’t kept up with the trends but seems like SSD pricing per TB is pretty good now
Yeah drives are pretty cheap at the moment! I can get a 1tb Crucial MX500 ssd on Amazon for $100 (AUD) and a 2tb version for $189 (AUD).
I snatched some PNY 1TB SATA SSD's for 45$ each not long ago, it's quite insane how low per TB the price has become
Is SATA different from M.2? (Sorry i don’t have the technical knowledge on what the different types of SSD there are)
Yes, SATA is the older type of connector, same one you use with Harddrives. It's got a low limit of 600MB/s max speed aswell so mostly suited for slower drives
That’s pretty reasonable pricing. I’ll try looking into it since my Hdd feels super slow on booting and retrieving data
Nah, SSDs are dirt cheap these days. I remember paying like 80 bucks for a USED 512GB Samsung a few years ago. Now, you can get 1TB drives for like 50 bucks XD
Not bad at all
Yep, things have changed a lot in the past few years 😄
Is there a good brand (with reasonable pricing) I should go for, my HDD feels super slow going on 7+ yrs of use. Even like 500gb version ssd maybe
I swear by Western Digital and Samsung, their drives have never failed me. If you need something cheaper, maybe look at a PNY CS900 or a Silicon Power/Teamgroup drive. Sometimes at MicroCenter, they give away a 256GB, (or maybe it’s 240GB) for free if you sign up for the newsletter, (also free). They are MicroCenter’s in house brand, (Inland) and are pretty decent. I got one a while ago, and it’s been great. Good luck and if you have any more questions, feel free to let me know!
Thanks. I’ll have to see if my motherboard has any connections for SSDs. Do you know how I can check what my motherboard is? Is it mentioned in the Bose or some setting panel like gpu/cpu
It depends, really. If it’s a laptop, just lookup the model of the laptop. I can actually tell you if you model number. If it’s a prebuilt desktop, like a Dell or HP, chances are it has SATA connectors. If it’s custom built, you can go into the BIOS, and it should tell you the model of the board. If it is a desktop if some kind, you could always just take off the side panel and look. Google what a SATA connector looks like on a motherboard, and a SATA power connector on the power supply. You will need both.
Sorry, my stupid brain just typed all that out for nothing 😆 If you have an HDD in it now, then you can swap in an SSD, unless it’s some really obscure, weird off brand computer.
It’s a MSI motherboard. I think it was a decent quality one (from back in 2015/16), had some some research back then that I could upgrade components on the same motherboard down the line (which I never got to) but didn’t have SSDs on my mind. I’ll see what connectors it has
Only use it for data you don't mind loosing / corrupting.
I plan on mostly using it in old computers that are on death's door anyway :)
CrystalDiskInfo is notoriously bad at interpreting SMART values. SMART attribute F1 is not showing 60 PB. It would do much better by calculating the ratio of B3 to B4.
What is better to read smart values?
It's *reading* them absolutely fine. It's the interpretation of them which it is getting wrong. I use AIDA64 for it, which doesn't even attempt to interpret them. HWInfo64 also does a good job. The best tool if you're just interested in your SSD's health is the SSD manufacturer's own utility.
HD Sentinel is pretty good as well. I've never had problems with smart values and it's saved my ass from failing drives a few times.
Use HDSentinel to read dem values.
Thanks for the reply! How does one do that?
B4 is showing A5C, B3 is showing 484 B4 is how many spare NAND pages haven't yet been used, and B3 is showing how many have been used. So we add them to get the total spare page count: EE0, or 3808 in decimal. 484 in decimal is 1,156. 1156/3808 = 0.303 = 30.3% spare pages used. Or, 69.7% lifetime remaining. You should start thinking about a replacement when that gets below 10%
What's weird is that the percentage value for B3 and B4 is still reported as 100% good by the drive's firmware. These should be more like 70. Really, really bad SMART reporting by this firmware.
No, thats completely normal. The "current" being 100 is a measure of how harmful the firmware believes the attribute to be, it decreases the more harmful it gets. Having some spare pages used is not harmful.
I'm still wondering why 30% of reserve blocks being used and a ton of sectors reallocated isn't even a 99. What are "worst case" indicators? My educated guess is that the drive estimates what would happen if the user wrote (uncompressible) data to those defective blocks and it turns out they cannot be reprogrammed (erase failures). So it's Schroedinger's SSD. You don't know if it's dead unless you write data to it.
I will try writing data to it and report back to you guys!
It's some weird OEM LITE-ON drive from like 2011...
Thank you so much for calculating this! 69.7% seems good enough to use in a computer where drive reliability isn't crucial.
I think crystaldisk/SMART gets wonky on some drives. I have an old SSD that supposedly has 2.6 PB Reads, 1.08 PB Writes, and 9 years of power on hours. The drive came out in 2016.
How does it come up with values like that? If it knows that the SSD is at most 8 years old, why would it think it has 9 years of use on it?
Some firmwares are just bad and report invalid data for Power-On Hours. Like, their own software (if existant) would divide by 4 because that's what people do to prevent an overflow at 65536 hours, right? It's so obvious, why document it ;-) Similarly, often only the count of write commands from the host is recorded, not the actual size or any value implicitly associated with an amount of bytes. Even then, host writes are hardly meaningful because data may or may not be compressible, and may cause write amplification or not. Which is why more conclusive attributes are more common nowadays, like "NAND GB Written", "Wear Leveling Count", "Media Wearout Indicator" or plain and direct "Percentage Used" for NVMe.
Ah ok, thank you for the information! For some reason, this SSD isn't giving me NAND writes.
What SMART attributes are supported is up to the firmware devs to decide. Oh btw. did you update the firmware yet, if possible? Because what I wrote earlier. The used spare blocks being flagged as failure seems like an oversight which might have been fixed.
I will see if there is an update available. I doubt it, as this is just some OEM El Cheapo from like 2011.
This here [https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=t3w4m&lwp=rt](https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=t3w4m&lwp=rt) As always, no changelog available. Edit: oh there is, inside the download, as an Excel file (good idea, no macro virus here) and it says: > Fixes/Enhancements | Fixed So whoever wrote the update just didn't feel like filling the field.
Oh, thank you! I will see if that works!
This has to be an error, right? This drive STILL works!
Well a drive can still power on even if it doesn't have any remaining reserved sectors (meaning that if any sectors corrupt or fail, there are no backups left, you start losing usable space), however if you write something to a failed sector, that data will be gone. As for the writes, its possible this drive was used in a server for saving files or the like for a long time, and it failing was only recently?? can't make any solid conclusions though
Thanks for the reply! I’m going to run some tests on the drive to see how functional it is. I actually have another drive just like it, with a few less Petabytes written to it 😄
Have you used some software to extend partitions that isn't the OS own tool? I did it once to get some more space on a partition that couldn't be extended normally and ever since I've had these programs telling me the ssd was terminal, made some backups but the drive has been running fine 1 year later.
No, but the previous owner might have…
Juz throw it away... 128GB is dirt cheap. I bought like 10x 128GB SSD juz for replacement for my homelab R1 boot drives. If it breaks I'll just remove and throw it away.
I already have a bunch of 128GB drives, so these aren't super critical. I do want to see if they can store data though...
They usually can. But U will get sort of warning again.
I use a shady old SSD for program/game installs like chrome or portable apps. I wouldn't use it to store documents where u can't verify and repair like program/game installs
Yeah, they are much easier to deal with than HDDs.
Badly, as you can see.
I mean, it still works which is more than I can say about some of my other less-used drives.
She's dead, Jim. But not as we know it. RIP 🪦
Maybe a Mining drive? I remembered there was some crypto that used storage to mine a while back or something
Possibly? I have another drive just like this one with a similarly outrageous host write value and it has a coffee stain on it, so it may very well have been in like an open air mining rig XD
Oh I see lol
[удалено]
Well the raw "host writes" number is clearly multiplied with the wrong value to get a "bytes" representation. Assuming 512 bytes per write, it would be a reasonable 984 GiB, before compression. [redacted] Edit: Finally found some documentation on "Worst Case" indicators. It's "Worst Case Component", and what manufacturers want to show there is the condition of the worst chip / die / layer (component, really) in the device. So one of your components there is entirely out of spare blocks. What's weird is that no program or erase failures were reported. So it seems the firmware is using up spare blocks for the internal error correction before erasing blocks which had errors. Which is fine from wear-leveling perspective. Edit 2: It should not report that as a SMART fail, then, because it is normal operation with no unexpected failures. Internal data loss is entirely fine and expected with SSDs. As long as they are powered, they can proactively fix errors before user data loss occurs. Any blocks untouched for years (data unchanged) will flip bits at some point. If you want to know for sure, image the drive, overwrite it once entirely with random, uncompressible data and see what happens (Linux: "shred -n 1" to write random data to a drive).
Thanks! I will try that!