SMART info incorrect? - excessive Total Host Writes

[Anywher]

Hi Guys

 

The system drive on my 'Media PC' is showing some very scary SMART readings. I bought this drive about 3.5  years ago and it's sitting at 1% health? - 148779 GB Total Host Writes which I calculated is 113 GB per day on a 120 GB drive!

 

Just some background on this machine. It sits powered on 24h with a bittorrent client running but all data is written and read from an external 6TB USB drive plus our downloads are very light.   We then have a windows share on the external 6TB to watch TV shows on our android tablets or laptops.

 

Resource monitor doesn't show anything abnormal. I feel like I'm going a bit crazy here.. is it possible that the SMART data is incorrect or is there something about our setup that could be causing this?

 

Thanks!

[Prodigy_Smit]

2 minutes ago, Anywher said:

is it possible that the SMART data incorrect

Smart data is generally not incorrect. But this seemes weird

 

[cynexit]

Some manufacturers don't really stick to SMART standards, I had this with WD drives which basically required you to use the SMART monitoring program from WD to get correct readings. For this reason I would say give samsungs own SMART reader a go, the values maybe make more sense in there.

[Dutch_Master]

Yes, it's very possible SMART sensors report incorrect data back. I had an SSD that reported its temperature as 128C throughout its 7+year working life in my file server, while other drives in that same enclosure were around 40-ish. And a HDD I have reports 4.3bn seek error rate as well as 20+bn raw error rate. But it still reports as a healthy disk in the RAID it's in.

[porina]

That average write rate works out to be over 1MB/s. I was going to speculate if some background logging data might be responsible but that's a lot if it were the case. Look again at resource monitor, is there 1MB/s total between everything going on?

[Anywher]

36 minutes ago, porina said:

That average write rate works out to be over 1MB/s. I was going to speculate if some background logging data might be responsible but that's a lot if it were the case. Look again at resource monitor, is there 1MB/s total between everything going on?

I have been monitoring the resource monitor while downloading / seeding and watching a show on my phone and all I see are occasional spikes of approximately 60-100 KB/s for writes. The External drive is seeing all the activity.

51 minutes ago, cynexit said:

Some manufacturers don't really stick to SMART standards, I had this with WD drives which basically required you to use the SMART monitoring program from WD to get correct readings. For this reason I would say give samsungs own SMART reader a go, the values maybe make more sense in there.

Thanks I will try this. I wasn't aware they had their own software. I'll report back

Edited August 21, 2020 by Anywher
typos

[porina]

14 minutes ago, Anywher said:

I have been monitoring the resource monitor while downloading / seeding and watching a show on my phone and all I see are occasional spikes of approximately 60-100 KB/s for writes. The External drive is seeing all the activity.

I don't know what options there are, but it would be interesting to somehow log disk activity on the SSD only. If there is nothing writing a little all the time, it could be something else writing a lot in one go, but not when you're looking at it.

 

I have to wonder if write amplification might apply here, but given the description is Host Writes I'm guessing not. 

[Anywher]

Got Samsung magician (what annoying UI) and got same results. Showing up as 145 TB written and status as 'Good'

 

Should I be seeing performance issues with this SSD if in fact I have written 145TB to it? No performance issues to report and benchmarks look good.

 

2 minutes ago, porina said:

I don't know what options there are, but it would be interesting to somehow log disk activity on the SSD only. If there is nothing writing a little all the time, it could be something else writing a lot in one go, but not when you're looking at it.

 

I have to wonder if write amplification might apply here, but given the description is Host Writes I'm guessing not. 

Yeah good idea I'll look into logging disk activity for a few days.

 

At this stage I am tempted to clone this drive to my spare Corsair 120GB SSD and see what happens with that drive.

 

if the Media PC was to go down during COVID lockdown it will be a pretty bad time for me.

[cynexit]

10 minutes ago, Anywher said:

Got Samsung magician (what annoying UI) and got same results. Showing up as 145 TB written and status as 'Good'

 

Should I be seeing performance issues with this SSD if in fact I have written 145TB to it? No performance issues to report and benchmarks look good.

I would argue the values are correct then, but if the status is still "Good" you do not have anything to worry about. It has often been reported that SSDs can take way more writes than the manufacturer says on the fact sheet (see here and the end of the test).

As long as there is sufficient free space (15%~20%) on the disk to trim and shuffle blocks without issues then there is a good chance drives can take much more TB written than expected. That being said: I would keep Samsung magician (totally agree on the UI btw) running in the background so it can alert you if the drive is actually starting to fail (afaik it should then go into read-only mode).

[Anywher]

10 minutes ago, cynexit said:

I would argue the values are correct then, but if the status is still "Good" you do not have anything to worry about. It has often been reported that SSDs can take way more writes than the manufacturer says on the fact sheet (see here and the end of the test).

As long as there is sufficient free space (15%~20%) on the disk to trim and shuffle blocks without issues then there is a good chance drives can take much more TB written than expected. That being said: I would keep Samsung magician (totally agree on the UI btw) running in the background so it can alert you if the drive is actually starting to fail (afaik it should then go into read-only mode).

Thanks for this. I will keep Samsung Magician running and keep monitoring the drive. It has over 55GB free as it's just the system drive plus a few programs.

 

In the meantime I found a guide on how to log disk activity using windows performance monitor if anyone is interested - https://www.smartertools.com/blog/2016/07/15-configure-perfmon-to-prevent-disk-issues