An SSD I bought in November is showing 58% health. Am I screwed?

[Tunnah]

I bought a Crucial MX300 on 5th November. Acronis has just told me the drive is at 59% health. Should I have this RMA'ed before it dies or do I need to wait for it to fail ?

Super annoying, the SSD before this also failed before its time, however it was a notoriously bad SSD. Have I picked another bad model or is this just bad luck ?

[MrJim]

If I were you I'd check your SSD with the Crucial Storage Executive, and see what kind of health report it gives you on the drive. If it says it's not so good, I'd RMA it...

http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/support-storage-executive

[Tunnah]

If I were you I'd check your SSD with the Crucial Storage Executive, and see what kind of health report it gives you on the drive. If it says it's not so good, I'd RMA it...

http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/support-storage-executive

Funnily enough I installed that right after I posted, as I also posted on the Crucial forum. It says the drive is 99% healthy and is basically saying those reallocated blocks are unimportant. But I'm unsure if to trust it. I have a different SSD that I use for torrents, for the last 5 years it has been absolutely battered, and Acronis reports it as 70% healthy. Crucial SE reports it as 99% healthy too..

I dunno what to do. I'm planning on getting another SSD soon (games are just stupid size nowadays), so I can relegate this to a secondary rather than OS. I just don't want it to hold on for a year then die 3s past the warranty ha

[satrow]

Try another 3rd party software, Hard Disk Sentinel, there's a trial version available (and the full version is sometimes offered by giveaway sites), check the Overview tab and also see whether Trim is Enabled and Active: http://www.hdsentinel.com/

[EndlessWaves]

Hard drive SMART information is given by the drive and the format is partly manufacturer specific while the 'health' readout is an estimation done by the program you're using to check it. Acronis gives the details of their calculation here:
https://kb.acronis.com/content/9264

As you've found it leads to inconsistent results so shouldn't be taken very seriously.

Looking at the actual data it appears Acronis is flagging the reallocated sectors count because Crucial have set of a threshold of 10. You could contact crucial with the information that it's over the threshold and see what they say. There's another 1,916 reserved sectors available for reallocation though, so it's not a big number.

As your wear levelling count is only 25 instead of the 300+ that the drive is rated for it's clearly nowhere near it's design lifetime so they may be initial cell failures.

I would keep an eye on it over the next few months, take dated screenshots and see what changes. Some of them like the wear levelling count will climb which is normal but if you see sectors continue to be reallocated it may be worth returning it.

[i7Baby]

"Should I have this RMA'ed before it dies or do I need to wait for it to fail ?"

RMA it for sure.

[scaryjim]

"Should I have this RMA'ed before it dies or do I need to wait for it to fail ?"

RMA it for sure.

What do you think Crucial will do if he RMAs it? They'll almost certainly load up their own monitoring software, which he's already used and which says the drive has 99% health - at which point they send it back as "no issue found" and the OP ends up paying postage both ways for the privilege.

There's some excellent advice above from EndlessWave, which I'll reiterate:

1) Drop Crucial support a line, potentially with your Acronis screenshot, and ask them for advice. They may have existing information about Acronis' health level reporting in terms of whether it's accurate and if not, why not.

2) Continue to monitor the drive. Take regular (maybe weekly?) readings of the health and other SMART counters to see if anything is changing. If the state of the disk remains consistent across multiple readings over several months then it's probably safe to assume that you're looking at a manufacturing error here, rather than a degradation over time (which would be the concerning option).

[sam3]

I would first use another program. I just tried acronis disk monitor on my system and it jumbles quite a few of the values and is missing a lot of the ssd smart specific values (factory bad block count, rated life used etc).
It looks like this program was not designed for ssd's

Try one of the above mentioned or crystal disk info and post the results here. If using crystaldiskinfo first change raw values to 10 [dec] rather than hex, under function/advanced feature/raw values.

[Csikasz]

In the company I use various tools to see what is wrong, Aida64 one of them, when it reports any reallocated sectors, I send back the SSDs immediately where I bought them from. Like Scan or Overclockers etc. It's very very rare when I see any and so far all of them was replaced without further questioning.

so why not to send it back

[Tunnah]

Thanks all for your help, sorry for not replying this thread got buried, I need better notification settings.

I'll try another piece of software, I'm going to go with the assumption that it's bad reading