Drive Health (Take 2)

[Thomas60]

Hello,
I would like to ask another question with regards to drive health, I have a PCSN530 NVME WDC 512GB as boot drive. As per incident and prior question posted in this forum (27/03/2022) associated to that incident
I come across another anomaly to that particular drive. In the HDS Version 6.01 shows a health of 95% and it seems in regular intervals to count down, whereas my second NVMW (Samsung) which is much older is still 100% health.

Now I recently installed WDC Dashboard Software and to my surprise the Drive that show 95% health in HDS shows 100& health in WDC Dashboard.

Needless to say I am a bit confused and wonder if there is a perhaps a bug that also could have cause the previous issue causing the drive to return to 100% health for the one day before dropping again to the previous value.

As always any help or suggestion is greatly appreciated.

Thanks Thomas

[hdsentinel]

While I completely understand - no need to be confused: this discussed numerous times on this forum and also on the website (see below).

As you can see in the text description of Hard Disk Sentinel (assuming that the SSD is perfect):

The status of the solid state disk is PERFECT. Problematic or weak sectors were not found.
The health is determined by SSD specific S.M.A.R.T. attribute(s): Available Spare (Percent), Percentage Used

Please check the S.M.A.R.T. page of the SSD, you can see many attributes, including the above mentioned two.
One of them the Available Spare Percent reflects the amount of spare area free which related to possible bad sectors (as they replaced from this spare area)
The Percentage Used reflects the amount of wear caused by writes. This is usually changing with time, causing slow but sure degradation.

Hard Disk Sentinel checks both of them and report the lower value as the REAL Health % of the SSD, which can help us to notice degradation and also plan replacement when required (eg. below 25% or so).


Other tools (especially but not limited to manufacturer-specific tools) happily ignore ONE or BOTH of the above values and always show 100% health regardless of the actual status of the SSD.
This causes false assumptions and wrong conclusion and confusion.

Manufacturer-specific tools usually ignore reporting the wearout level - exactly to always show 100% for their products. This is "normal" as such tools NOT designed to show the real health/degradation (really) but designed only to minimise warranty requests. So until the SSD fails (or a very low health reached) they can always show 100% perfect status.

Other tools usually completely ignore possible spare area use - and happily show 100% perfect for almost failing SSDs too. This is also "normal". Not good and not expected, but they work this way.

Please contact the support of the other tools - as hopefully they can explain why they ignore one of the above mentioned important factors in determining the REAL health % of the SSD.


For more information, please check:

https://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#difference
(see the SSD Health section)

https://www.hdsentinel.com/ssd_case_hea ... earout.php
https://www.hdsentinel.com/ssd_case_bad_sectors.php

and

https://www.hdsentinel.com/kb/category/ ... orted.html

as these areas ALL designed exactly to prevent such/similar confusions

And as always, if you use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, I'm more than happy to check the real status and advise.

[Thomas60]

Great explanation, thank you very much.

I viewed & compared both sets of data and could not find a difference at first, but then popped up a "New Version Update for the WDC Dashboard app)
of course I immediately downloaded and upgrade to the latest version 3.6.2.7 before writing an email to WDC requesting how they got to the "Drive Health %"
reported in the there app.
After upgrade and restart of the WDC Dashboard app I was happy to see that we are now on the same page in all reporting i.e the 95% reported by HDS is now also
reported in WDC Dashboard. - Nobody is perfect ..

Again thanks for your explanation, spot on ..

Cheers Thomas