@Charlie98: What did you mean, earlier in this thread, when you said it's been "triggering" and CrystalDiskInfo "alerts" about it? Your image of CrystalDiskInfo doesn't show a yellow alert; it's all blue. (The limited portion that we can see, that is... in the future you might want to resize the Crystal window when you screencapture, so we will be able to see all of the SMART data.)
Regarding the "good" news I reported yesterday about the daily WAF shrinking to 11... unforunately it's gone up considerably during the approximately 21 hours since then, to about 30. (In a few hours I'll check again, when I log my "official" daily values.) Possibly the 11 was a fluke, or perhaps a short term benefit of briefly turning off the pc (resetting the ssd). Hopefully the next few days of logging will shed more light.
Regarding the possibility of a defragger running, which you and someone else discussed earlier, couldn't that possibility have been ruled out by the small 3,961 GB Total Host Writes? The problem clearly seems to be the ssd's large Write Amplification Factor, not the host pc writing more than necessary. Given the small Total Host Writes, I think the only thing the pc might be doing wrong is failing to convert frequent small random writes into occasional large sequential writes by failing to cache writes cleverly.
I'm wondering if the high WAF could be caused by an ssd firmware "bug" that reveals itself only when the pc writes very little to the ssd. In other words, perhaps the ssd has a background "optimization" process that's scheduled to run frequently, much more frequently than necessary in the case when little is written to the ssd. Micron's software engineers might have the process scheduled to run periodically, with a period that's far too short when the pc writes at a low rate. Both you and I have very low rates of host pc writing to the ssd. After Remaining Life reached 95% in December, I noticed (using HWiNFO) that the pc was averaging more than 1 MByte/second writing to the ssd, and I reduced the average to less than 0.1 MByte/second by moving some frequently written files from ssd to hard drive and disabling the scanning of archive files during Comodo's weekly full virus scan. Since then, the reduction in Remaining Life has accelerated, paradoxically. But I don't know if the reduced writing was the cause of the acceleration; it could be coincidence. This theory could be tested by moving the frequently written files back to the ssd from hard drive, and reenabling Comodo's scanning of archive files, to see if it reduces WAF and paradoxically slows down the decrease of Remaining Life.
Does your ssd's 1550 Power On Hours look correct to you? Storage Executive reports my ssd has had 991 POH. But my pc has been set for the last 5 months to Never Sleep (and Never Turn Off Hard Disk) so I don't understand how the ssd could have spent much time in a low power state during those months. When I observe HWiNFO, it appears the pc never goes more than a few seconds without writing something to ssd. Perhaps the strangely low POH implies the ssd goes into one of the low power states as soon as it completes an operation, rather than waiting for an idle timer to eventually trigger the switch to a low power state. Perhaps most computers write so much more to their ssd that their ssd rarely enters a low power state, and perhaps the transition to or from low power involves writing extra to the ssd.
Another untested theory is that VMware Player has a virtual disk driver that's buggy and interferes with Windows' write caching, so that many small random writes to ssd occur instead of a few large sequential writes, as if the Windows write cache were turned off. I almost never run a vm anymore, but assuming VMware has a disk driver installed, it could in principle affect disk writing even when Player isn't running.
Did you try to enable Crucial/Micron's Momentum Cache? I tried to install it in January, after Remaining Life reached 95%. After I installed Storage Executive (which includes Momentum Cache) it reported that Momentum Cache was "inactive," and tech support has been unable to find the reason why it won't activate. On the theory that the "inactive" Momentum Cache driver might be interfering with Windows write caching, a few days ago I "disabled" Momentum Cache, which I think caused Storage Executive to delete the Momentum Cache driver before it restarted the pc. That apparently didn't solve the problem. In a few days, I plan to uninstall Storage Executive entirely to see if that helps. (After I uninstall Storage Executive, I'll need to reenable CrystalDiskInfo or install some other SMART monitor to be able to continue measuring the daily WAF.)
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