Interesting SSD wear rate - Mac Pro

[OVERKILL]

I have a SanDisk SDSSDA480 480GB SSD that I use as my primary (boot) drive in my Mac Pro. Of course SanDisk (WD) doesn't provide any firmware update or health tools for MacOS so I pulled the drive the other night, slapped it in my son's PC and fired up their utility. I was surprised to see that drive life was at 85%. This is a system with 32GB of RAM, so swapping SHOULD be relatively minimal.

The drive was installed on January 28th, 2016, so it is just over 5 years old now. Once I realized that I thought.... well, 5 years, 15% wear, not too bad! Compared to what @bunnspecial is seeing on his new M1 MacBook.

 

[ripcord]

How is "drive life" defined? Does 85% remaining life mean that 15% of the spare space was used to reallocate bad sectors? Or is it just some formulae of X number of writes divided by the expected write lifecycle? From what I understand, the write cycle limit on most SSD's is pretty conservatively rated and most will go quite a bit longer than specified before degrading too much.

 

[Zee09]

As a standalone HD in business machines I never had any luck with many brands. One morning you get a blank screen and the party is over.
All had great warranties but when you wanted them to make good they acted like mid 80's Honda dealers.
Our stuff doesn't fail....

 

[OVERKILL]

How is "drive life" defined? Does 85% remaining life mean that 15% of the spare space was used to reallocate bad sectors? Or is it just some formulae of X number of writes divided by the expected write lifecycle? From what I understand, the write cycle limit on most SSD's is pretty conservatively rated and most will go quite a bit longer than specified before degrading too much.

SanDisk defines it simply as:

Life Remaining - The life remaining percentage represents the remaining amount of writes that the drive can perform during its lifetime.

And yes, that's probably a conservative figure.

Reassign sector count is still at 0 and Spare Block Remaining is still at 100%.

It appears this figure is based on the SMART parameter "Media Wear Out Indicator", which is at 15%.

 

[OVERKILL]

As a standalone HD in business machines I never had any luck with many brands. One morning you get a blank screen and the party is over.
All had great warranties but when you wanted them to make good they acted like mid 80's Honda dealers.
Our stuff doesn't fail....

I've had excellent service from WD products. My experience spans several thousand devices and WD definitely stands-out as experiencing the lowest rate of failure.

 

[Zee09]

I've had excellent service from WD products. My experience spans several thousand devices and WD definitely stands-out as experiencing the lowest rate of failure.

That is one brand I have never used in ssd fashion. Had good luck with their traditional hd's albeit a bit noisy.
I can't remember the maker offhand but they had HD ssd's named Racers. Everyone failed on very short order and they fought me tooth and nail on the warranties even though I kept the boxes and receipts etc.
When I did get new ones I dumped them off on Ebay...lol

 

[OVERKILL]

That is one brand I have never used in ssd fashion. Had good luck with their traditional hd's albeit a bit noisy.
I can't remember the maker offhand but they had HD ssd's named Racers. Everyone failed on very short order and they fought me tooth and nail on the warranties even though I kept the boxes and receipts etc.
When I did get new ones I dumped them off on Ebay...lol

WD's SSD brand is SanDisk. Another one I've had excellent luck with, who doesn't make traditional spinning drives is Kingston. However, I tried one very early on in this Mac and it introduced weird lag spikes, which is why I switched to the SanDisk which doesn't have that problem. No idea why that happened with that particular brand of drive but not another.

 

[Zee09]

WD's SSD brand is SanDisk. Another one I've had excellent luck with, who doesn't make traditional spinning drives is Kingston. However, I tried one very early on in this Mac and it introduced weird lag spikes, which is why I switched to the SanDisk which doesn't have that problem. No idea why that happened with that particular brand of drive but not another.

In fairness Amazon sent many a HD to a quick death with crappy packaging.
Many were simply thrown box-less in thin bubble mailer.

Once they sent one with my endmills. Nice.

 

[JMJNet]

WD's SSD brand is SanDisk. Another one I've had excellent luck with, who doesn't make traditional spinning drives is Kingston. However, I tried one very early on in this Mac and it introduced weird lag spikes, which is why I switched to the SanDisk which doesn't have that problem. No idea why that happened with that particular brand of drive but not another.

WD bought Sandisk.
They also have WD Blue SSD.

 

[Mainia]

I have a SanDisk SDSSDA480 480GB SSD that I use as my primary (boot) drive in my Mac Pro. Of course SanDisk (WD) doesn't provide any firmware update or health tools for MacOS so I pulled the drive the other night, slapped it in my son's PC and fired up their utility. I was surprised to see that drive life was at 85%. This is a system with 32GB of RAM, so swapping SHOULD be relatively minimal.

The drive was installed on January 28th, 2016, so it is just over 5 years old now. Once I realized that I thought.... well, 5 years, 15% wear, not too bad! Compared to what @bunnspecial is seeing on his new M1 MacBook.

M1 issue. I don't have time to read all of bunns thread, but the last I saw it was a browser and some other programs. Both can be fixed easy. Firefox was destroying drive faster then anyone I though I read. A couple of About:config changes and it is fixed. Firefox might of already done those changes in an update. Too bad for the early guys with 25% ++ of their wear leveling killed. That should be all fixed by the time my iMac gets made.

 

[ZeeOSix]

My Dell laptop that is only about 1 year and 3 months old has used 5% of the SSD life (512 GB SSD). I think if you do a lot of full system virus scanning it will eat up some SSD life. I do a lot of file copy/save action on this machine too.

Here's a snap-shot of Crystal Disk.

 

[ZeeOSix]

Firefox was destroying drive faster then anyone I though I read. A couple of About:config changes and it is fixed. Firefox might of already done those changes in an update.

I use Firefox, and usually have 50+ tabs open at a time. Maybe that's burning up my SSD more than it should - ??.

Maybe I'll start using Mircrosoft Edge, which will puts tabs to sleep if they are inactive. Don't know why Firefox doesn't do the same.

 

[OVERKILL]

WD bought Sandisk.

Yes, way back at the beginning of 2016.

They also have WD Blue SSD.

The WD-branded SSD's were introduced after the SanDisk acquisition and were just re-branded SanDisk products.

So as I stated, WD's SSD brand is SanDisk, the fact that this was through an acquisition doesn't change that, nor does the fact that they slapped the WD brand on a few of them to try to increase market share. How exactly your attempt at being pedantic is germane to the subject of this this thread escapes me but if you've got something of value to add to this exchange I'd gladly hear it.

 

[OVERKILL]

M1 issue. I don't have time to read all of bunns thread, but the last I saw it was a browser and some other programs. Both can be fixed easy. Firefox was destroying drive faster then anyone I though I read. A couple of About:config changes and it is fixed. Firefox might of already done those changes in an update. Too bad for the early guys with 25% ++ of their wear leveling killed. That should be all fixed by the time my iMac gets made.

I use Firefox regularly, in fact I have it open right now. At any one time I'm running three browsers on this box: Chrome, Firefox and Brave with a combined total of 51 tabs open.

@bunnspecial's issue seemed to revolve around too much swapping, thrashing the disk. He had wanted an M1 with more than 8GB of RAM and of course it isn't user expandable.

 

[paulri]

Interesting. I just downloaded that, and they said my Health Status was 100%. This is a 5 yo SSD. I use this for work and have written and saved a lot of data over the years (115gb used on my C partition; 135 on my D [data] partition).

So I guess 100% means it isn't expected to fail in a long time?

My Dell laptop that is only about 1 year and 3 months old has used 5% of the SSD life (512 GB SSD). I think if you do a lot of full system virus scanning it will eat up some SSD life. I do a lot of file copy/save action on this machine too.

Here's a snap-shot of Crystal Disk.

View attachment 60118

 

[paulri]

I always associated them with cheap HDDs and the only one I've had fail on a PC was a WD. But I read a blog or two from backblaze (a cloud backup company) that quantified how many drives of each manufacturer, and WD's failure rate was not as low as Toshiba, but it was still a lot lower than Seagate. So the current backup hard drive I have is a WD and I'll stick with them for the foreseeable future.

I've had excellent service from WD products. My experience spans several thousand devices and WD definitely stands-out as experiencing the lowest rate of failure.

 

[OVERKILL]

Interesting. I just downloaded that, and they said my Health Status was 100%. This is a 5 yo SSD. I use this for work and have written and saved a lot of data over the years (115gb used on my C partition; 135 on my D [data] partition).

So I guess 100% means it isn't expected to fail in a long time?

What brand of SSD do you have? Most of the well known OEM's have their own utility that will show you that information. It would be interesting to see if that statistic varies between Crystal Disk and that utility. I'll check on my son's rig in a little bit for S&G's, his is a SanDisk, it's showing 94% in the WD utility.

 

[paulri]

Not sure. I have a 5 yo lenovo thinkpad e555. Everywhere I've looked I don't see any info. I already had speccy but that didn't give me any info on the brand.

What brand of SSD do you have? Most of the well known OEM's have their own utility that will show you that information. It would be interesting to see if that statistic varies between Crystal Disk and that utility. I'll check on my son's rig in a little bit for S&G's, his is a SanDisk, it's showing 94% in the WD utility.

 

[OVERKILL]

I always associated them with cheap HDDs and the only one I've had fail on a PC was a WD. But I read a blog or two from backblaze (a cloud backup company) that quantified how many drives of each manufacturer, and WD's failure rate was not as low as Toshiba, but it was still a lot lower than Seagate. So the current backup hard drive I have is a WD and I'll stick with them for the foreseeable future.

Yes, they've always had a variety of product offerings, which has evolved over the years in terms of labelling. Some of those offerings were designed to be very inexpensive, but even so, they've been quite reliable. The current scheme, which has been around for quite a long time now employs colours. The "blue" offerings are low cost, as are the greens. The black, red and purple offerings are more money but supposed to be better and are targeted at specific niches.

I'm currently in the process of upgrading around 80x HP ProDesk mini PC's to Kingston KC600 512GB SSD's. They've all had WD Black 500GB 2.5" drives in them and while slow, only one of them was in the process of failing. These computers range in age from 2014 to 2019 and it is interesting to see how HP's selection of WD's 500GB offering has changed over that period:

The 2014 WD5000BPKX vs the 2019 WD5000LPLX (low profile, hence the LP):

 

[ZeeOSix]

@bunnspecial's issue seemed to revolve around too much swapping, thrashing the disk. He had wanted an M1 with more than 8GB of RAM and of course it isn't user expandable.

BTW - my laptop has 16 GB of RAM, and the RAM never really gets above 60-65% used in real time (watching Task Manager). So I would think my machine isn't doing a lot of swap file action. Yet, my SSD life decrease rate seems pretty high (5% uses in 15 months).