When an SSD Reaches 0% (Lifetime Left) Does The Drive Automatically Stop Working?

jason101 on 04/08/2021 - 22:14
Last edited 04/08/2021 - 22:14

Hi Ozbargainers,

For a bit of fun I thought I'd start a small Chia farm on an old PC and add my collection of old clunker HDD's to store plots. I installed a shiny new SSD and began farming.

I understand the heavy workload while plotting will kill the SSD eventually, Crystal disk info tells me the last 3-4 weeks of plotting with hard disk utilisation at near 100% 24x7 have resulted in 85% of the drive being good (or 15% of life having been expended).

My question is will the drive simply stop working (like a toner with a chip in it that tells it when it reaches 0% to simply stop) or will the drive just suffer a slow and painful death on or around the 0% mark ? I've googled around and can't seem to find a definitive answer.

For anyone interested 15% wear has generated around 72 x K-32 plots, so I think I'll run out of clunker HDD farm space well before the plotting drive dies.

Computing Computer Component SSD

Comments

  • [Deactivated] on 04/08/2021 - 22:25

    I've had a Crucial P1 SSD fail after 2 years. Drive speed dropped to shit. Data is all accessible.

  • darshu on 04/08/2021 - 23:03

    SMART should throw warnings

    • darshu on 04/08/2021 - 23:19
      +1

      That lifespan percentage is more likely indicating the number of writes to cells on average. SSDs have algorithms to maintain relatively constant number of writes for each memory cell. When a cell reach its writing cycle threshold or read/write fail (normally it’s the write which fails), it will be marked as a bad sector and data will not be written. When the number of bad sectors reach a threshold the disk will stop working. It is hard to say when it will stop. Keep an eye on the number of bad sectors. When you see the number goes up, it reduces the life of ssd exponentially.

  • smashman42 on 05/08/2021 - 00:01
    +3

    Every SSD I've had die has just abruptly stopped working when it still had 90% of its life left by that metric

    It is just a counter for what the drive is rated for (theoretical) worst case scenario of wearing out, ignoring instant catastrophic failure - one of the review places (not sure if if was Serve the Home, or Tom's Hardware, or Anandtech or who - but it was way before Chia) did a SSD burnout test a few years back and most of the drives kept working past the zero point, some dramatically past it like more than doubled their "write limit" and I think the "winner" passed the 1000% mark.

    Perhaps with newer drives they have a finer tolerance now and do die closer past the 100% point, but the point is it isn't a hard stop.

  • nige0090 on 05/08/2021 - 15:42

    My download disk is a DRAM less Kingston SSD rated for 40TBW.
    HD Sentinel tells me that it has written 39.84TB to date, with 70% health remaining, based on its SMART #231 SSD Wear Indicator.
    Its health has been dropping in a pretty linear manner over the last few months, relative to its usage.
    I'm curiously awaiting its actual failure and wondering how much over the TBW it will last.
    When it does, I will replace it with a SSD with a DRAM cache, which should exceed its TBW by a greater margin.
    Hopefully..

    • jason101 on 05/08/2021 - 20:14

      If it fails, please let me know, just out of curiosity i'm interested to see how far in real terms SSD's can last. I'm actually surprised there isn't more user data about it online (that I can find).

      My MSY $115 Crucial CT100BX 1tb has now written 101TB with 85% life left. So far, I am very impressed. If it can keep it up I would theoretically get 7-8months of 24x7 torture test @ 100% use out of it - I think its pretty good value.

      • cimrak on 05/08/2021 - 21:21

        The last SSD that "failed" for me was a Samsung 850 EVO 120GB. I can still read/write to it, but the system it was in marked it failed for "predictive failure" errors.

        CrystalDiskInfo showed 3.8 years of Power On Hours, 90TB of writes (datasheet says it's rated for 75TB TBW) with 79% health remaining.

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