[ale] OT SSD remaining lifetime indicator

[Lawrence Hamblin]

I tried this out earlier, and it wasn't able to give me an estimate of my
drive's lifetime because, apparently, it doesn't report that statistic.  It
did, however, say that my drive was healthy.  I'm running Windows 7 Pro
64-bit on a 128GB Samsung 830 SSD, which has been rock solid for the past
nine months since I bought it.  I'm upgrading to a 512GB model soon.

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 4:32 PM, David Tomaschik <david at systemoverlord.com>wrote:

> 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
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