TBW?

[Joni_78]

SSD from one of my PC's died (Samsung 970 Evo). I noticed it has 5 year or 600TBW warranty. Warranty ends 18.10.2023 if it does not have over 600TBW. How do I check the TBW of this drive, is that something that Samsung Magician shows?

[Xenon]

Samsung magician does show that. Under Drive Dashboard. 

[hellowalkman Reporter]

you can use HWiNFO too https://www.neowin.net/news/tags/hwinfo/

[Steven P. Administrators]

If it died, how can you see the TBW?

This is concerning for me, so all of a sudden a SSD can just stop working? Under what circumstances does it get to 600TBW?

A HDD does not have this limitation does it?

[Joni_78]

On 19/09/2023 at 20:23, Steven P. said:

If it died, how can you see the TBW?

This is concerning for me, so all of a sudden a SSD can just stop working? Under what circumstances does it get to 600TBW?

A HDD does not have this limitation does it?

Sorry not completely dead. BSOD's. It has had this problem for over a year. It happens everyday when I turn on the PC. It's ok for couple of minutes but then BSOD even if the PC is just idling. It then repeats couple of times until it works fine for the rest of the day. This is not my main PC so I haven't had a need to repair it but now I thought I'll finally fix it and bought new memory and 980 Pro SSD. I replaced the memory, resetted bios and made a clean Windows install but nothing changed. I then replaced the SSD and no more BSOD. So I think it was the SSD.

Edited September 19, 2023 by Joni_78

[Xenon]

On 19/09/2023 at 13:40, Joni_78 said:

Sorry not completely dead. BSOD's. It has had this problem for over a year. It happens everyday when I turn on the PC. It's ok for couple of minutes but then BSOD even if the PC is just idling. It then repeats couple of time until it works fine for the rest of the day. This is not my main PC so I haven't had a need to repair it but now I thought I'll finally fix it and bought new memory and 980 Pro SSD. I replaced the memory, resetted bios and made a clean Windows install but nothing changed. I then replaced the SSD and no more BSOD. So I think it was the SSD.

Could it be a thermal issue? Does it have a heatsink on?

[Joni_78]

I tried Samsung Magician on my Media Center PC with 990 Pro. That SSD is one week old and it has 604GB written on drive health.

This souds weird. Surely TBW on the warranty can't be the same as GB written on Samsung Magician? My warranty is soon over at this rate if I'm now at 0.6TB.

Nm. I partitioned SSD and it's D drive is for games. I moved 404Gb of games into it. Windows install is maybe 30Gb. So 170Gb a week in regular use so it would be about 44 200Gb in 5 years.

 

 

On 19/09/2023 at 20:41, Xenon said:

Could it be a thermal issue? Does it have a heatsink on?

No heatsink and I don't think so as it happens when the PC is "cold". But I'm pretty sure heat killed it. It's in ITX board and M.2 slot is behind the motherboard right next to the CPU socket.

Edited September 19, 2023 by Joni_78

[aphanic]

On 19/09/2023 at 19:44, Joni_78 said:

Surely TBW on the warranty can't be the same as GB written on Samsung Magician?

I can't say for Samsung's Magician, but it shouldn't, the T in TBW stands for tera: Terabytes Written

Hard Disk Sentinel should be able to tell you, I just installed a trial of the standard version to check whether it does in trial mode or if the Pro version was needed, but it was enough:

  

The section I highlighted is what you are looking for, the cumulative terabytes written to the disk, but see if it reports anything else up above too.

You mention it doesn't happen with a different drive and you already went through a clean install, so most variables were isolated. What is the BSOD about? Windows' reliability monitor, the problem reports or the event viewer should have some info, even if cryptic, you can launch any of the first 2 searching by name, in the event viewer you'd need to sieve through events, they ought to be logged as errors in Windows.

 

On 19/09/2023 at 19:23, Steven P. said:

so all of a sudden a SSD can just stop working? Under what circumstances does it get to 600TBW?

A HDD does not have this limitation does it?

Yes, of course they can, any component could fail after all making them not work, from a lowly voltage regulator to the controller or memory chips. Hard drives aren't inmune either, since they also have electronic components and controllers, with the added risks of moving parts (heads, motor, ...). I still remember "clicks of death", a sign one had died.

Any workload highly dependent on disk writes could get to that number of bytes written before the warranty time lapses, but it would need to be intensive, constant INSERT and UPDATE on large databases without much cache perhaps. I also remember having read a couple of years ago that cryptocurrencies using proof-of-space as their consensus algorithm could be heavy on disk writes, I am saying this without actually knowing about it, so take it with a grain of salt.

[Joni_78]

On 19/09/2023 at 21:40, aphanic said:

I can't say for Samsung's Magician, but it shouldn't, the T in TBW stands for tera: Terabytes Written

Hard Disk Sentinel should be able to tell you, I just installed a trial of the standard version to check whether it does in trial mode or if the Pro version was needed, but it was enough:

  

The section I highlighted is what you are looking for, the cumulative terabytes written to the disk, but see if it reports anything else up above too.

You mention it doesn't happen with a different drive and you already went through a clean install, so most variables were isolated. What is the BSOD about? Windows' reliability monitor, the problem reports or the event viewer should have some info, even if cryptic, you can launch any of the first 2 searching by name, in the event viewer you'd need to sieve through events, they ought to be logged as errors in Windows.

 

Yes, of course they can, any component could fail after all making them not work, from a lowly voltage regulator to the controller or memory chips. Hard drives aren't inmune either, since they also have electronic components and controllers, with the added risks of moving parts (heads, motor, ...). I still remember "clicks of death", a sign one had died.

Any workload highly dependent on disk writes could get to that number of bytes written before the warranty time lapses, but it would need to be intensive, constant INSERT and UPDATE on large databases without much cache perhaps. I also remember having read a couple of years ago that cryptocurrencies using proof-of-space as their consensus algorithm could be heavy on disk writes, I am saying this without actually knowing about it, so take it with a grain of salt.

Thank you. I'll try this, it would be interesting to see how much use it has had after 4+ years.

I can't remember if I deleted the partitions before I removed the 970. It might have 599,99 TBW and when Install Windows it goes over 600 :D. Oh well I wan't to know.

[aphanic]

On 19/09/2023 at 21:23, Joni_78 said:

It might have 599,99 TBW and when Install Windows it goes over 600

If you have an external NVMe to USB enclosure or another free M.2 port that is suitable for drives in that machine, perhaps you can check it that way and dispense with installing Windows in that drive anew, let's hope it is still covered by warranty.

[ThaCrip]

I assume everyone pretty much gave you your answer.

for the record... I got a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD (SATA) and I got it May 2015, so it's now 8 years and 4 months old. according to Linux (sudo smartctl -A /dev/sdx ; which shows Total_LBAs_Written = 62341797107. so take that number * 512 / 1024^4 = 29.030etc) I have 29.03TBW and it's officially rated for 75TBW. I generally avoid writing large amounts of data to it (which I put on regular hard drives) as I suspect this will last for the foreseeable future as I am averaging around 3.48TB a year.

p.s. I leave this computer on all of the time.

[Joni_78]

Just checked with Samsung Magician and Hard Disk Sentinel. It has 107TBW since 18.10.2018 so I'll RMA it. Thank you everyone for the help.

[+Warwagon MVC]

On 19/09/2023 at 12:23, Steven P. said:

If it died, how can you see the TBW?

This is concerning for me, so all of a sudden a SSD can just stop working?

Absolutely and what's worse is when SSD's decide to die, they don't even show up to the system, at least that has been my experience. Hard drives tend to die a more graceful death.

[haxasaur]

On 20/09/2023 at 08:55, Warwagon said:

Absolutely and what's worse is when SSD's decide to die, they don't even show up to the system, at least that has been my experience. Hard drives tend to die a more graceful death.

Can confirm. My NVME drive just died from one day to the next without any "warnings". I got it to boot once in safe mode and thought it was okay, because Crystal Disk Info reported it was all good. Never booted up again after that. Tried different slot on motherboard, tried external NVME drive reader on different computers. The drive failed to initialize when it did get recognized. The worst thing is there goes my non-backed up data. Good thing is, warranty is replacing my drive with a newer version, as they retired the one I purchased.

When it came to old spinning disks, they would slowly die instead of a quick death. At least in my experience.

[Steven P. Administrators]

On 20/09/2023 at 17:37, haxasaur said:

 Good thing is, warranty is replacing my drive with a newer version, as they retired the one I purchased.

Were you not worried they could retrieve the data?

[haxasaur]

On 20/09/2023 at 10:57, Steven P. said:

Were you not worried they could retrieve the data?

No, the data has bitlocker on it I believe. Also, the drive was pretty dead.

[Joni_78]

I sent the drive to the store I bought it on Saturday and received new drive yesterday. This PC had this problem for over a year but I've been too lazy to fix it. Now when I finally did and the fault was in the drive I thought it must be out of warranty but I then thought I check it anyway and I was surprised it was 5 years and ends 18.10.2023. This drive cost 299 € when I bought it so it was nice to get a new one.