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Tool to see if SSD is going to screw up - write and verify large amounts of data?

E

evilspoons

Senior member
Hi everyone,

I have an SSD that used to be part of a RAID-1 set. I had a server with two Intel SSD 510 250 GB drives running Server 2008 R2 behind a RAID controller that could not send TRIM to the poor SSDs. This worked fine from when the SSDs were new (2011) to a few months ago, when the RAID set degraded.

I only noticed a few days ago (email alerting wasn't set up properly and my company's IT company didn't notice either), so I swapped the good and bad SSD 510 out with new Samsung 850 Pro 256 GB drives.

I now have a "good" SSD 510 250 GB and a "bad maybe?" one. I did a "secure erase" on the "bad" one though, and formatted it in Windows 7 on a desktop PC, and as far as I can tell there's nothing wrong with it aside from Intel SSD Toolbox indicating it's at 90% Estimated Life Remaining.

Can I run some sort of automated test on it to see if I can induce the same write errors that caused it to drop out of the RAID set in the first place? I ran CrystalDiskMark with 4 GB test size and nothing bad happened, and I copied some data over and did a CRC/SHA1 check on it, and I also did the "Full Diagnostic" in Intel SSD Toolbox, and everything is happy.

Note I don't plan on putting this drive back in a server, just maybe upgrading some poor old slow laptop.
 
Well, the only way to tell is to fill it up with some kind of data, and then do checksum tests on it.

I usually use a rar file(s), since, you can quickly tell if an archive is corrupted.
 
Will it be more likely to show the error if you really fill up the drive near to capacity? Maybe there was not really an error, but rather just an issue with not doing TRIM for so long?
 
Just use it and abuse it with non critical data and see if it holds up. Drive probably is OK but you'll never know unless you try it. For free all you got to loose is your time.....Possibly some data.
 
LexS said:
If you have Mac OSX, you may consider DriveDx:
http://binaryfruit.com/drivedx.
Good predictive formulas.
Click to expand...

I see no evidence at all that it has good predictive formulas.
It just monitors SMART info, and then it tells you a guesstimate of what will happen.
Thus, I say it is a waste of $$$, and is basically snake-oil.

You can do pretty much the same thing using crystaldiskinfo (or whatever), and keep an eye on the SMART stats, all for free.
Linux also have free stuff.
 
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