How can I check for data corruption and the health of the SSD?

[lsquare]

I remember there is a utility to check for the health of HDDs and in a way do more of what Windows does to check for corrupt files on a HDD. What's the equivalent for SSD?

 

[Burner27]

'SSD Life' will check the health of your SSD. As for corruption - what are you looking for specifically that leads you to believe your drive is corrupted? If you did a secure-erase to your SSD, you would basically return your drive to like-new factory state. If it is something physically wrong with the SSD, then I would RMA it.

 

[lsquare]

I didn't do anything wrong. I was just wondering.

I have a Crucial M4 128GB SSD. Does Crucial provide a utility to secure-erase my SSD and or check the health of it? I want to check from time to time.

Thx for the help Burner27!

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

If you're paranoid about data integrity, nothing beats computing a bunch of MD5 hashes and regularly comparing files to it.

 

[lsquare]

If you're paranoid about data integrity, nothing beats computing a bunch of MD5 hashes and regularly comparing files to it.

Not exactly. Say an unexpected power outage and the computer loses power. I just want to check that the drive is ok.

 

[Nothinman]

The SMART data and manufacturer tools will tell you the health of the drive, but the drive has no idea if the data it's storing is corrupt or not. You need something at a higher level to determine if the bits on the drive are correct. The only filesystems I know that do that out of the box are ZFS and BTRFS, neither of which are supported by Windows.

For Windows, chkdsk will tell you if the filesystem itself has problems, but not the data within it. For that you need some 3rd party tool like an MD5/SHA1 checksum tool to generate the good hashes and then verify them for you later.

 

[lsquare]

How do I use SMART with my Crucial M4?

 

[Elixer]

How do I use SMART with my Crucial M4?

Eh? Just enable it in the BIOS.
Then you get something like CrystalDiskInfo (free) to monitor it.

 

[Burner27]

I didn't do anything wrong. I was just wondering.

I have a Crucial M4 128GB SSD. Does Crucial provide a utility to secure-erase my SSD and or check the health of it? I want to check from time to time.

Thx for the help Burner27!

There's a secure erase utility built into Parted Magic but Crucial themselves does not have one. If data integrity is of concern you should be backing up your data in the event of a failure.

 

[bryanW1995]

Heh, that's a nice thing about Diablo III. Everybody keeps complaining about this "always online" crap, but at least if I lose my array I won't lose my barbarian...

 

[Elixer]

Heh, that's a nice thing about Diablo III. Everybody keeps complaining about this "always online" crap, but at least if I lose my array I won't lose my barbarian...

Unless their disk array goes down, and their backups as well, or they close up shop...so crap DRM is and always will be crap. :whiste:

back OT, if you are really paranoid, you could make a zip/rar/7zip file of whatever files (say, 500MB worth), and then copy that to the SSD a few times, then test the archive. Yeah, it is almost like doing MD5 tests, but a bit easier IMO.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

There's a secure erase utility built into Parted Magic but Crucial themselves does not have one. If data integrity is of concern you should be backing up your data in the event of a failure.

Another easy alternative for secure erasing is using gparted.
Download the latest ISO, burn, boot, open command prompt, execute "hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sda", done.

NOTE : Replace /dev/sda with whatever your SSD is (sdb, sdc, etc.)

 

[npaladin-2000]

Another easy alternative for secure erasing is using gparted.
Download the latest ISO, burn, boot, open command prompt, execute "hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sda", done.

NOTE : Replace /dev/sda with whatever your SSD is (sdb, sdc, etc.)

Uhh, Parted Magic IS gparted.