Reports Health of 0% after installing version 6.10

[LeonThePC]

Hello,

I was using version 5.x of HD Sentinel until I manually had the program check for an update. Before updating, HD Sentinel reported a health of 89% for my SSD, after the update it reported a health of 0%.

Why?

[hdsentinel]

Without knowing the details, hard to say anything for sure.

5.x version can be a very-very old version, probably released long before your SSD, so there is good chance that it could not yet properly support it.
There is good chance that the new version can detect/report error/failure condition which was not yet detected by the older version.

Generally the text description designed exactly to explain the situation, describe the problem/issue found.

As always, I recommend to use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, then it is possible to check the actual SSD model, firmware, its complete status and advise/confirm.

[LeonThePC]

thank you I sent the report to the Developer.

[hdsentinel]

From the report, yes, now I see the situation.

Yes, I'm afraid what you see is completely "normal" and expected in this situation. No, there is no bug here, I can confirm that the latest version supports this SSD properly and the 0% Health is expected in this case.

The previous version released before this SSD - so could not check/interpret its status. While the old version showed higher Health %, I'm afrad that was not correct. This is why generally always recommended to use the latest possible version.

First some words about the background in general (this described in the forum/website many times so you may skip):

As you may know, the memory cells in solid state devices experience wear during each write operations and each cells tolerate only a limited number of overwrite passes.
The "wear-leveling" feature of the SSD tries to hide/minimise this effect but generally the SSD reports the overall health of the memory cells by various attributes.

If there are no further problems found, Hard Disk Sentinel reads these attributes determining the complete health of the solid state device.
This is displayed on the Overview page for your SSD:

The health is determined by SSD specific S.M.A.R.T. attribute(s): #202 Percentage Of The Rated Lifetime Used

During this change, ideally the SSD shows no problems: disk tests should show no errors. However, as the memory cells worn, they may be harder
to read back (which means the SSD will be slower) and when the health drops to very low health (eg. 5 %), it may begin producing errors too.

This is described in the Help too, online at
https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/52_cond.html
(see the bottom of the page for SSD health information).

Also these pages
https://www.hdsentinel.com/ssd_case_health_decrease_wearout.php
https://www.hdsentinel.com/kb/category/16/solid-state-drives-ssds/why-my-ssd-shows-98-health-if-no-problems-reported.html
describe the situation with more details, exactly to help in similar situations.


In your case, the 0% Health is displayed because the SSD already reached the end of its designed lifetime.
If you check the mentioned

202 Percentage Of The Rated Lifetime Used

attribute on the S.M.A.R.T. page, you may see the number 115 on the bottom graph (maybe you can see the change with time, as the value could be recorded by the previous version of the software).

This means that the defined amount of overwrite (program/erase) cycles of the SSD already reached, more precisely currently your SSD is at 115% of the manufacturer-defined maximum erase cycles. The memory cells may continue working properly even after this manufacturer-defined limit, but can generally fail any time: file(s) may be hard to read or the SSD may be "just" much slower than expected.

According the Information page, relatively high amount of data written to the SSD

Lifetime Writes : 44.95 TB

Alone this would be not too much - but probably lots of small files saved/updated regularly which caused the excessive wear.

You may see things are working correctly, perfectly. Yes, this is true, we can find tests online showing that we can write much more data (even 1000's of TBs) to the SSD and until the SSD is powered, it can automatically (and more frequently) refresh the stored data - but problems start more likely when the SSD is powered OFF for longer time, then there is good chance that the stored information can't be read back properly.

If you are interested, you may open Disk menu -> Device Specific Information page which attempts to detect/report additional status information, including details about wearout and/or amount of written data. If you save and send the results of that page, I can also check too.

[LeonThePC]

Crucial's website says that the Lifetime writes (TBW) for my drive is 180TB why is the program reporting that it is 45TB
https://www.crucial.com/ssd/mx500/CT500MX500SSD1

[hdsentinel]

Hard Disk Sentinel does not report that the TBW is 45 TB, I wonder why you think that....

Hard Disk Sentinel just reports that the total amount of written data until now is 45 TB.

As I tried to explain, the Health % itself is calculated by the SSD itself, Hard Disk Sentinel "just" reads and shows the calculated value.
So it is good question why the SSD reports itself as 0 % Healthy when 45 TB written. I recommend to ask Crucial support - as they can probably explain the situation.

Pleas note that usually the type of written data is important: updating lots of small files can cause much bigger wear / faster degradation of the Health (even if the total amount of written data is relatively small).

[LeonThePC]

I am sorry, I misunderstood when you said in your previous post "Lifetime Writes : 44.95 TB". I thought you were saying that HD Sentinel was reporting that the maximum Lifetime Writes for the drive was 44.95.

I once read that not all SMART attributes were standard. That some manufacturers have added their own attributes. Thank you for clarifying that the Health % is actually reported by the Drive itself and it is not a calculation created by the programmers of HD Sentinel.

I will contact Crucial and ask why the health is down to 0%

[JedWare]

I am sorry, I misunderstood when you said in your previous post "Lifetime Writes : 44.95 TB". I thought you were saying that HD Sentinel was reporting that the maximum Lifetime Writes for the drive was 44.95.

I once read that not all SMART attributes were standard. That some manufacturers have added their own attributes. Thank you for clarifying that the Health % is actually reported by the Drive itself and it is not a calculation created by the programmers of HD Sentinel.

I will contact Crucial and ask why the health is down to 0%

Did you get a response from Crucial? I have several Crucial drives and have this issue as well. I actually watched as the Percent drop by 20% in one day when no measurable activity happened on the drive. If Sentinel is to be believed then Crucial drives only last 1-2 years and that doesn't seem right. I have other drives that are my primary computers running for 8+ years and not showing the same degradation.

I currently have one Crucial Drive that only has 25TB written showing 0 percent health. The thing is I have been running this for over a year and half at zero percent health with no issues. Would like to know what is going on here.