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Your final point is so obvious, though, that I've got to wonder why such an app hasn't been developed yet; although it obviously couldn't provide definitive failure anticipation, it doesn't seem as if it would be a big deal to enable it to provide at least minimal proactive early warning functionality which would certainly surpass the functionality of Drive Scope and DriveDx.
I suspect part of the reason is SMART was playing second fiddle to surface scans and other indicators applicable to HDs. The resurgence of interest in SMART is fairly recent and is just now being fleshed out. 🤷â€â™‚ï¸
But... You didn't actually answer the question I (thought I) really asked, namely, do the different mixes of SMART attributes reported for my Samsung and SanDisk SSDs give either report an edge in assisting me in anticipating drive failure?
Yes — if you understand enough about what they are reporting to interpret the attributes. There are a whole series of SMART attributes for hard drives and SATA connected SSDs that are intended to indicate a drive is in a "pre-failure" status, and others that indicate the age of the drive and both are so designated in the Drive Scope report. Whether a report indicates a parameter is a "pre-fail" indicator or not that attribute still indicates "pre-fail status". See
Drive Scope HD Attributes. Any positive number in a pre-fail attribute is at least a caution flag. If a pre-fail attribute racks up half of the threshold value you should have the drives replacement on order and planning your switchover strategy. Typically the closer you get to a threshold value the faster the rate of deteriration.
Unfortunately NVMe drives do not have as rich a set of SMARY attributes. (See
Drive Scope NVMe Attributes) but the Spares statistics are a good surrogate for "pre-fail" attributes and units Read and Written are a decent indicator of age while any NO in the Yes/No attributes indicates failure.
And in a different vein, doesn't it seem odd that only one SMART attribute is reported for freelance's SSD?
There are a LOT of reasons for that:
- The drive is connected via USB and the USB standard does not allow for reporting SMART so he is getting the report via what is essentially a hack.
- The enclosure is a two drive hardware RAID which is pretty much guaranteed to be either RAID 0 or RAID 1 and will be "seen" by the computer as if it were a single entity.
- We have no idea what attributes the two drives in the enclosure report or whether the closure attachment is ATA or NVMe and it is doubtful the hack can sort that out.
- I see the individual drives in my RAID array because the connection is Thunderbolt 2 which does provide for reporting SMART and I am using Software RAID so the data is read and written to individual drives and assembled into a single stream in the computer.
