My Nvme M.2 C drive health is 82%. Should I worry?

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My laptop is 5 years old and C SSD drive health is at 82%.
Is the drive on its last legs? Should I prepare to replace the M.2 SSD?

The laptop functions like new (is on 24/7/365) and I don’t see myself replacing it in the near future.

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TechTango

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I would indeed be concerned, but I would probably ask for a “second opinion” from Samsung Magician software since it’s a Samsung drive.

If you do as is suggested good practice on this site and keep regular backups, you can probably live on the edge for a while until the drive starts glitching or suddenly dies.

Prices seem to be easing a bit on M.2 drives and when I contemplate the effort needed to open up most laptops, I would take a serious look at replacing it with a “bang for the buck” larger drive of 1/2TB in size if that’s an economically viable option. It might well last longer too as a result of fewer writes to the same cells.

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I also monitor my drives with Crystal Disk Info, so I’m familiar.

For a 5 year old drive that runs 24/7/365 to be down only 18% seems remarkable and your still solid green. The color of the health changes.

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/crystaldiskinfo-health-status/

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Alex5723, Ascaris

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GeeBeeDee wrote:

I would probably ask for a “second opinion” from Samsung Magician software since it’s a Samsung drive.

Samsung Magician doesn’t support this SSD (it is too old, no support)

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The MZVLW256HEHP is an OEM rebrand of the 960 Evo, apparently. I am not sure why, but Samsung limits Magician to retail drives.

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Alex5723

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Available Spare is still at 100% (64 hex) so you have not worn anything out yet. The lower life will just be down to use so I expect you will have a few more years out of that one.

cheers, Paul

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Cybertooth, Ascaris, Alex5723

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Paul T wrote:

Available Spare is still at 100% (64 hex) so you have not worn anything out yet.

I thought so too, but isn’t <80% health a threshold for worn drive?

* I have 150GB free space out of 256GB.

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80% is the threshold for a laptop battery. I never heard of that being the threshold for a SSD.

I would say that drive still has plenty of life remaining in terms of the NAND rating. That’s all the drive health is… the percentage of the drive’s rated NAND write capacity remains. It will likely last substantially longer than its rated life, though, if some other failure (not related to media wear-out) does not happen first. The Samsung 840 Pro that TechReport tested went well beyond its rated capacity. It spent a good chunk of its useful life at 0% health!

If the drive was beginning to fail, I would expect to see increasing numbers of bad sectors be relocated. The drive has wear leveling algorithms that attempt to spread the wear and tear across all of the NAND cells evenly, so if you get more than a couple (could be isolated weak cells from the factory) relocated sectors, and they keep coming, you’re probably at the practical end of life. All the NAND are about the same level of being worn out, so once they start, they will tend to keep coming.

Note that this is only about NAND wear-out. SSDs can fail from many things, and NAND wear-out is just one of them. As always, keep decent backups just in case. I wouldn’t trust even a brand new SSD with data that I have no other copy of. They can always fail, and without warning (and that includes HDDs).

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Cybertooth, Alex5723

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I suspect 80% is a measure of how much you’ve written vs the designed write limit of the drive, but we know from the studies that write limits are very conservative.
https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes/

cheers, Paul

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Cybertooth, Alex5723

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