Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi all,
I've recently purchased a new Samsung 120GB SSD (SATA3) which operates in SATA2 mode in my laptop. Only a few days later, health was degraded at 99%. However, HDD Sentinel reports:

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The status of the solid state disk is PERFECT. Problematic or weak sectors were not found. 
The TRIM feature of the SSD is supported and enabled for optimal performance.
The health is determined by SSD specific S.M.A.R.T. attribute(s):  #177 Wear Leveling Count

It is recommended to continuously monitor the hard disk status.

Here are the SMART data:

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5    Reallocated Sectors Co.. 10     100    100    000000000000        OK                       
9    Power On Time Count      0      99     99     00000000008F        OK (Always passing)               
12   Drive Power Cycle Count  0      99     99     00000000002F        OK (Always passing)                  
177  Wear Leveling Count      0      99     99     000000000002        OK (Always passing)                      
179  Used Reserved Block Co.. 10     100    100    000000000000        OK                                          
181  Program Fail Count (To.. 10     100    100    000000000000        OK                                 
182  Erase Fail Count (Total) 10     100    100    000000000000        OK                                 
183  Runtime Bad Block (Tot.. 10     100    100    000000000000        OK                                    
187  Uncorrectable Error Co.. 0      100    100    000000000000        OK (Always passing)                  
190  Temperature              0      73     60     00000000001B        OK (Always passing)                 
195  ECC Rate                 0      200    200    000000000000        OK (Always passing)                     
199  Ultra ATA CRC Error Co.. 0      100    100    000000000000        OK (Always passing)      
235  POR Recovery Count       0      99     99     000000000003        OK (Always passing)                          
241  Total LBA Written        0      99     99     000024E392C6        OK (Always passing)

Why is this happening? Is it an actual HD issue or not? Can I restore it to 100%
Thanks

Hi,

As you may know, the memory cells in solid state devices are wearing 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 device reports the overall health of the memory cells by various attributes.

If there are no further problems found, Hard Disk Sentinel reads these attributes which determine the complete health of the solid state device.

This is what you can see in the text description area: there are no problems found, but the #177 Wear Leveling Count attribute determines the overall health
of the device. If you want, you may check how that attribute changes with time on the S.M.A.R.T. page.

Because of the above, it is not really possible increase back the health as the memory cell wearing is permanent. The health of the SSD will slowly but constantly decrease, this is expected.

There are several settings of Windows possible to reduce wearing (for example a disabled swapfile, re-directing TEMP and "Temporary Internet files" folders to hard disks, disabling file last access time logging of Windows, etc...)
These would reduce the amount of data written to the SSD - which will cause that the health will decrease much slower.

I do not really feel the SMART data you copied is related to the SSD: it does not contain attribute #177 Wear leveling count.
So I suspect it is the SMART data of a connected hard disk instead.

You were right I pasted the wrong data. I've corrected it. Sorry for this.

Now about the whole health thing. Do you mean that this will keep decreasing? I find this strange for two reasons. 1) It decreased only hours after initial connection 2) Before this hard disk, I've had another SSD (OCZ) which also had the same attributes. But its health never decreased for about a year.

Apart from all that, the SMART details seem normal, don't you think? So how exactly can I find out in HDD Sentinel what caused the health degrade?

If you check the mentioned attribute

177 Wear Leveling Count

you will notice that the "Value" is 99. This describes the general health level of the SSD memory cells.
Samsung decided to drop from 100 to 99 very-very quickly. So on Samsung SSDs, this "Value" is 100 only for very short period - even after some hours of usage, this may decrease to 99.

This is why newer Hard Disk Sentinel versions displays 100% correctly in this situation (if there are no problems), until the SSD (really) experienced more usage. This depends on the time it used and the amount of written data.

Do you have the latest version of Hard Disk Sentinel (4.30)? If not, I'd recommend to update for that version as it may display 100% health.

In general, yes, the health constantly decreases for SSDs - which is completely normal.

Other models work the same way - but may provide a such generic health level differently. Other models (and the SSD controller used in them) may use further techniques (for example Sandforce SSD controllers compress data to reduce the amount of data actually written to the memory cells) - which may cause that the health level can be constant for longer time, even for months.

If you can use Report -> Send test report to developer option any time - it helps to check the actual situation. If you use it regularly, it is possible to check how the status changes, how often the value decreases.
In general, you do not need to worry until the health is very high (eg. 90% or above).

Hard Disk Monitoring

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