Total Lba Written?

I'm running a 1 TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, Windows 10 Pro x64 and Open Hardware Monitor.

The Open Hardware Monitor Gadget is set to report Total LBA written. Every time the computer is restarted, the number after the minus sign decreases (see att'd). Does this mean the SSD is reaching the end of it's useful life even though Hard Disk Sentinel Pro reports that the health of the SSD is excellent?

Should I clone/image the SSD to another drive because I need to replace this SSD soon?

 

Good article here:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/consumer-grade-ssds-actually-last-a-hell-of-a-long-time/

 

Sorry Max, not the info I was looking for. Their "torture test" used Samsung 840's of much smaller capacity than my 850 and nothing is mentioned about LBA.

 

No worries it gives statistics about those runs and life cycle and I doubt those tests are any less useful no matter the size of the drive , the same if you do a simple internet search for what LBA writes signify.

 

No. It is most likely you will retire this entire computer long before that SSD reaches the end of its life. That's what wear leveling and TRIM are all about.

From Samsung, Total LBA Written just "Represents the total size of all LBAs (Logical Block Address) required for all of the write requests sent to the SSD from the OS."

It does not represent or suggest anything about the expected life expectancy of the drive. And how can that be a negative number?

What does Samsung Magician say?

When I look at my two SSDs (Samsung 850 Pro and 850 EVO) in this system with Speccy, I see both as positive numbers (8,113,538,019 and 2,093,771,589 respectively - and both with status of Good. And that makes sense as my 850EVO is not used near as much as the Pro, which is my boot disk.

But when I run Open Hardware Monitor, I also see a negative number for the EVO, but not the Pro. And neither match Speccy numbers. So I think the problem is with Open Hardware Monitor, not your SSD.

 

Yeah, I found something about OHM incorrectly reporting LBA (hence the negative number?). My concern was that once the LBA reached zero, the drive would stop working/brick. But since Hard Disk Sentinel Pro reports the health of the drive as being excellent, I'm just going to eliminate the LBA reading from the OHM gadget. I use OHM mostly for temperature readings anyway (I run two laptops). I'm not running Samsung Magician because Win 10 handles TRIM.

 

I would not worry about that at all. OHM is just a monitor. It does not control the SSD.

I don't run it in real-time either because I agree, W10 knows how to manage SSDs just fine. And when I installed it and selected optimize, it totally changed my sleep settings - just assuming I didn't want to my computer to go to sleep. I also found it to hog resources needlessly without improving performance.

But I have called it up on occasion just for temporary monitoring cases like this - at least on my last computer. I have not bothered to install it on this computer.

Did you check out Speccy?

 

No. I'm running Belarc Advisor.

 

??? That does not matter. They are two totally different programs. And just looking at Belarc, it does not provide any LBA data anyway.

I recommend you keep Speccy in your toolbag of utilities regardless. It is a great hardware "information" program.

The only issue I have found with it is it sometimes reports inaccurate voltages at the motherboard sensors. But they are so far off, it is totally obvious. For example, it reports for this computer the +3.3V is at 2.028 V, the +5V is 3.367 V and for my +12V, my PSU is only putting out 0.048V. If any of those were right, this computer would not be running. But the other information, including temps, are all accurate.

 

Speccy reports 12,758,009,386 LBA written. Perhaps that's not accurate either since I bought this SSD used with a reported 9,999 hours of use and I've downloaded a ton of 3 GB+ ISOs. But, then again, I don't quite know what LBA equals.

 

9999 is only a little more than 1 year. Note the Samsung Pro series of SSDs are warrantied for 10 years! No hard drive, for example, comes close to that.

And downloading a ton of large files does not really mean anything. It is not the size of the files that ages the SSD. It is number of writes to each storage location. So if you downloaded a huge file, and saved it once, that is just 1 write cycle. Wear leveling and TRIM may cause that write number to go up a bit even distribute those writes, but not to any alarming factor.

Here's a good AnandTech article about endurance with the 840 EVO (and the 850 you have is a newer generation with even better endurance).

 

Samsung Magician reports 5.9 TB written which isn't much considering I've read that the SSD can withstand several PetaBytes. I don't think I need to worry about either of my SSDs failing during my lifetime (I'm 64).

Thanks for the info.

 

Well, you are still a young pup (I'm 65 ) but yeah, there's no reason not to expect your SSDs will last many many years. They have no moving parts and don't generate much heat. And NAND memory technology, while certainly advanced and intricate, is very reliable.

Of course, until Man can create perfection 100% of the time, there is always the possibility of premature failure. Or if some scumbag decides to break into your home and steal your computer, there's not much you can do about that. And if Mother Nature has it out for you and sends a bolt of lightning, deluge, fire, tornado your way, or fells a giant tree onto your house, there's nothing you can do about that either.

So as always, keep current backups - hopefully with at least one copy off-site.