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sunhux

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Proactive / pre-emptive monitoring of SSD degradation

Extracted from an IT forum:

"Even server grade SSD's are prone to sudden failures. Mostly due to exceeded max write count. And when they fail you lose whole data stored on them (happened few times in my work).

You can read SSD disks all the time but writing to them causes fast wear. Most SSD's have a specific limit of number of writes (more specific erase cycles for memory blocks) and when they reach that limit they just stop working.

In my laptop (not so heavily used - few VM's and ubuntu desktop (30% of the drive left unpartitioned) an intel consumer grade SSD died in a year (no files recoverable). "

Having read the above & I'm using a Crucial M500 SSD on my Thinkpad (& there's no space to
put in another HDD to do mirroring), would like to know

a) is there any freeware / tool out there that could do preemptive monitoring
    of my SSD deterioration & warn me before it fails

b) besides regular backup, is there any other way to prevent a complete failure?
    I know in the old days, Norton Utilities will mark a sector as bad & attempts
    to recover the data to another sector

c) I've heard of HDD where a certain % is reserved for sort of RAIDing.  Maybe
    I've recalled wrongly but is there such a method for SSD (if it's available
    for HDD) ?

d) after how many writes will my M500 SSD (250GB) fail or is close to the
    threshold of failing?  Any tool to monitor the number of this "write IO" ?
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Aaron Tomosky
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sunhux

ASKER

Where can I download this  "smart" monitor software?
Could you provide me the link?  Needed for Win 7,
Win XP & Macbook Snow Leopard.

Does this "smart" software warns me before an SSD
is about to fail?


2 more questions:

c) I've heard of HDD where a certain % is reserved for sort of RAIDing.  Maybe
    I've recalled wrongly but is there such a method for SSD (if it's available
    for HDD) ?

d) after how many writes will my M500 SSD (250GB) fail or is close to the
    threshold of failing?  Any tool to monitor the number of this "write IO" ?
SOLUTION
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ASKER

http://bit.ly/1FF8EZF

Above link does not have any software that monitors the status of the SSD
or does it?
Avatar of sunhux

ASKER

Any other software eg: the "Smart" software that does such monitoring?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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