Originally Posted By: joemikeb
Originally Posted By: artie505
...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.

I think I"m beginning to understand this.

After looking through your report and my two (Damn design copyrights!), I"m left with these questions:
  1. I assume it's manufacturer option, but do you see any logic as to why some attributes are identified as "Pre-Fail" on one drive and "Life-Span/Old Age" on another?
  2. "Any positive number" in which column of your report?
  3. Would you please explain "If a pre-fail attribute racks up half of the threshold value" graphically? I don't follow it from what I've been looking at.

Originally Posted By: joemikeb
Originally Posted By: artie505
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.

The report on my SanDisk SSD was generated by the same "hack," and it appears to be complete.

The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

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