Recommended testing for my internal drive?

How, what, where and why - when using the software.
Virgil
Posts: 23
Joined: 2020.02.11. 09:23

Recommended testing for my internal drive?

Post by Virgil »

I have a Dell Inspiron 5482 laptop with a 256GB Toshiba NVMe drive. The HD Sentinel status for this disk is as follows:
"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
The TRIM feature of the SSD is supported and enabled for optimal performance.

No actions needed.
"

When I purchased HD Sentinel a few weeks ago, the Health value was 93% and since then it has gradually been reduced to 91%. I bought the laptop less than a year ago. I suppose that the drop in Health must be related to how much use one makes of the laptop, although I'm surprised to see such a drop in less than a year (assuming that it must have started at 100% Health).

My question is, other than monitoring the Health value from time to time, is there anything else that I could do to test this drive regularly?
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hdsentinel
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Re: Recommended testing for my internal drive?

Post by hdsentinel »

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. So the health of the SSD will slowly but surely decrease. This is normal.
Hard Disk Sentinel shows which attribute(s) used to determine the health when the SSD is otherwise perfect and the decrease is related to wearout.

Please check https://www.hdsentinel.com/ssd_case_hea ... earout.php
for more information about the situation. This shows that this decrease is not evil: it helps us to find out the possible lifetime of the device and plan/consider replacement when required. This should be in many years in your case.

Yes, the health decrease is related to how the disk used, mostly related to the amount of data written on it.
So if possible to reduce the amount of data written, the decrease will be slower. The SSD will not "re-gain" its health, but it's health will slowly decrease.

For such SSDs, you can use Disk menu -> Surface test -> Read test if you prefer to run a complete disk test which scans all sectors for issues.
It may show a notification that the disk can't be locked for exclusive use during the testing (because Windows is running on it and there are open files on the device) but you can proceed the test with no problems to verify the situation: reveal possible damaged/unreadable sectors or confirm if the SSD is generally working correctly.
Virgil
Posts: 23
Joined: 2020.02.11. 09:23

Re: Recommended testing for my internal drive?

Post by Virgil »

Thank you very much for the information. Your explanation makes me realize how much a hard disk is like a human (or any living organism) body. The end is inevitable...

Take care in this difficult period for everyone on Earth.
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