How to measure the health condition of SSD?

Question

SSD is always aging as it's being used. There are some formulas for evaluating its lifetime. But is there any metric for measuring the health condition of SSD? I'm trying to find out how SSD become worn out with time(under certain workload). I'm expecting something like a curve as the result. Any idea or information?

Answer 1

You'll want to contact your manufacturer, since there is no guarantee that any two manufacturers will implement SMART the same way.

For what it's worth, Corsair did a write endurance test on their blog. They posted the SMART indicators they used on the Forceware drives.

http://www.corsair.com/blog/force-series-ssd-life-testing/

Three files were placed on the drive: a 35 KiB excel file, 49 KiB word document, and 2,181 KiB JPEG image. MD5 hashes were generated for the three files before testing commenced. Throughout the testing, the MD5 for the files were repeatedly generated and no changes in MD5 value ever occurred. File integrity remained at 100%.

The 40 GB (true SI notation, 1000 MB = 1 GB) Force drive has approximately 37.2 GiB (1 Gibibyte = 1024 MiB) of capacity. Note from here on, I will not be using the true SI notation of Giga and Tera-bytes, bur rather Gibi and Tibi-bytes, which is actually what Windows uses and what the common reader would be familiar with. The endurance test was set to fill 36 GiB of the drive at a time with random data, then delete it and repeat. It is believed the static data on the drive (the three test files) are rotated among the cells for even wear leveling.