SSD wear vs HDD wear and health rating
SSD wear vs HDD wear and health rating
Just wondering why SSD health is decreased for no reason other than the continuous use of it but my HDDs that are over 7 years old still report 100% health after all this years. Are HDDs immune to wear?
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hdsentinel
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Re: SSD wear vs HDD wear and health rating
"for no reason" - sorry, but I'm afraid you're wrong.... There is good reason for the health decrease.
As described numerous times on this forum and on the website: the memory cells in solid state devices experience wear during each write operations and on flash storage (SSDs, pendrives, memory cars) each cells tolerate only a limited number of overwrite (program/erase) passes.
If there are no further problems found, Hard Disk Sentinel reads these attributes which determine the complete health of the solid state device.
Please see:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/kb/category/ ... orted.html
https://www.hdsentinel.com/ssd_case_hea ... earout.php
as these pages designed exactly to describe the situation: why the health of the SSD is slowly but surely degrade with normal use (caused by writes).
This is not "evil". This gives the opportunity both to reveal possible excessive writes (and allow us to consider changes) which can cause quick health drop(s) and also to plan replacement when required.
In contrast, the number of overwrites on a hard disk drive is not limited, so the writes do not cause health decrease/degradation with time.
This is why ideally yes, an older hard disk can still have 100% health, even after many years. Older hard disks may have other issue: after the end of designed lifetime (when the estimated remaining lifetime is low, suggesting that replacement may be recommended in a mission critical environment) hard disks may suffer from instant failure (even if they reported 100% health) because of the mechanic wear. But it is a different topic.
As described numerous times on this forum and on the website: the memory cells in solid state devices experience wear during each write operations and on flash storage (SSDs, pendrives, memory cars) each cells tolerate only a limited number of overwrite (program/erase) passes.
If there are no further problems found, Hard Disk Sentinel reads these attributes which determine the complete health of the solid state device.
Please see:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/kb/category/ ... orted.html
https://www.hdsentinel.com/ssd_case_hea ... earout.php
as these pages designed exactly to describe the situation: why the health of the SSD is slowly but surely degrade with normal use (caused by writes).
This is not "evil". This gives the opportunity both to reveal possible excessive writes (and allow us to consider changes) which can cause quick health drop(s) and also to plan replacement when required.
In contrast, the number of overwrites on a hard disk drive is not limited, so the writes do not cause health decrease/degradation with time.
This is why ideally yes, an older hard disk can still have 100% health, even after many years. Older hard disks may have other issue: after the end of designed lifetime (when the estimated remaining lifetime is low, suggesting that replacement may be recommended in a mission critical environment) hard disks may suffer from instant failure (even if they reported 100% health) because of the mechanic wear. But it is a different topic.