Storage Is this an issue with my SSD?

Happy bank holiday Monday all!

I'll keep this one brief as there are leftover little triangle sandwiches to eat and boring tax things to do:

• as per the title, is 67% health as shown above an issue given this is not really an old drive? It certainly sounds like it. What's the %age even based on?
• how can I tell what NAND/controller etc. the drive is equipped with? I have two newer ones I wanted to check were the original TLC, not the new QLC versions the rumour mill is saying that Crucial have changed to. I thought Crystal would show this info but I can't seem to find the option anywhere

As always, thanks in advance for whatever insight you can lend!

 

Crucial? check the firmware. They had a batch of dodgy ones.

 

Yeah, cheers VT - I heard this as well, hence the sudden post-purchase panic check.

The one in place (and shown above) I've had a while, so hoping that's okay, but I'll do some research into what the dodgy batch numbers were.

Any idea re: finding out NAND type though?

 

IIRC there was actually a glitch with mx500's where even new drives would show as knackered/bad health/worrying errors via CDM, check it with a different piece of software. I have had a few of these drives and encountered this before and it worried me.
I can't remember wether it was the firmware or CDM itself causing the issue though, but it is well known if you look online.

 

Ah! Handy to know - cheers dude

What's our next best way of checking outside of Crystal?

 

Damn it might have been the gigabyte drive I had actually now that I think about it, but it's hard to remember as I had 1 of each at the time - what I do remember is it was a bug in the SMART reporting of the firmware that was never fixed?

Regardless of if i've got it wrong I will tell you this I'm on my 3rd mx500 now and they're a solid drive, I literally put a 2tb one in my ps4 slim recently purely from how happy I've been in the past using them in my macs.

I had a 2tb one as storage that I was constantly hammering for a good year and it's still going 2 years nearly after in a friends pc now being used as a main boot drive/steam library.

 

Looking at the datasheet, it has 180TBW endurance and 1.8 million hours MBTF, so you're fine. MX500's had a firmware flaw where they'd stop writing, but that was over a decade ago now. Affected an ooooold housemate.

 

Grabbed a copy of Crucial's Storage Executive and have found the following slightly troubling info out:



Which for a drive with very few errors showing (but no obvious indication of TBW other than the rather unbelievable ~30TB reported by Crystal...on a 0.5TB drive) is somewhat concerning, especially when using their own software. Firmware is apparently on the latest revision - but again, don't know if that's a good thing or not (especially since I don't remember even updating the thing) - I'm on MC3R023, but this article suggests the 033 version that was pulled was the dodgy one. It also threw up this error when having a peek at one of the menu options:



...which is also a bit worrying. It should surely be able to read the details, at least?

I have found this interesting-looking article which I've yet to read in full, but still no way of reading controller and NAND type other than possibly SSD-Z from Guru3d, where some of the reviews (admittedly from quite some time ago, so possibly teething issues for the software) were less than glowing. Has anyone used this or similar?

The two new drives I've just received are stamped with M3CR045 as the firmware revision, so either mine is not in fact running the latest version; the Storage Executive software is flawed; or they have actually changed the architecture since my drive and the new firmware is as a result of that (with it not being applicable to my older drive)...which was also partly the point of this investigation. This thread seems to suggest issues remain with updating and the Storage Exec software.

Starting to get frustrated with the lack of decent accessible info or utilities out there .

That is correct!
(Sorry, had to...)

 

Yeah, I don't get it at all now.

Spoke to Crucial chat-dude and he said that the 67% is surely accurate, but when I had that chat with him I was showing 29,932 GB written to this 500 GB disk. Nine days later I'm showing 30,218 GB written, which for a boot/OS drive is pretty incredible. Not only that, but in the time it took for me to write him a reply and go online to search for some info as to what might be happening, the total written figure went up to 30,223 GB.

The only other thing the system was doing was downloading a Steam game to an external USB drive, so unless it was caching on the SSD to start with, I don't see how the number has increased in a matter of half an hour. The game was a 37 GB download, so an increase of 5 GB still doesn't make sense, even if that were to be the case.

So I'm thinking either the numbers/software/disk messaging is wrong and the disk is fine, or there is some weird voodoo shiit happening that is going to kill my drive soon and I should start moving things off of it (touch wood). Either way, I've also been unable to find a conclusive way to test what sort of NAND these new MX5s are populated with, so I suppose I'll just hang onto them (since last reports were of them running TLC) and maybe use them for game libraries, or just back up any OS partitions very regularly.