[ale] OT SSD remaining lifetime indicator

[David Tomaschik]

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