Originally Posted By: joemikeb
Originally Posted By: artie505
...as a matter of fact, I'm not even sure what symptoms indicate a bad SSD.

As far as I know there has been no scientific study of SSD failure equivalent to Google Labs landmark study of HD failure that identified new bad data blocks as the best indicator of impending failure and at the same time pointed out S.M.A.R.T. testing was nearly useless because of the manufacturer's tendency to bias the failure levels so high they do not indicate anything short of total failure.

However, S.M.A.R.T. is built into SSDs as well as HDs and using a tool such as TechTool Pro 8, which reports each of the individual S.M.A.R.T. tests and not just the summary pass/fail results reported by Disk Utility, Drive Genius, and a host of other utilities. As with HDs not all drives report all the various S.M.A.R.T. values but viewed with an informed eye there are values or value trends that could be indicative of drive health such as Total Bad Blocks, Wear Leveling count, Used Reserve Block Count, Reallocation Event Count, Program Fail Count, and Erase fail count that can be informative. (FWIW those are among the thirty individual S.M.A.R.T. values reported by the OWC Mercure Electra SSD in TechTool Pro 8.)


Thanks for the detailed information about S.M.A.R.T. I will definitely look at the results of using the S.M.A.R.T. feature of TechTool Pro.

(BTW, an update for TechTool Pro, v8.0.4, just came out. I downloaded and installed it, just completed my weekly "disk" tasks, and as expected, it worked like a charm!)