Samsung NVMe SSD drive health is Fair

DeathKnight

DeathKnight

Well-known member
Rage3D Subscriber
I've got a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD I use as my OS drive. I haven't taken a look at its health for quite some time now even though I have Samsung Magician installed (it just stays minimized in the task bar). An update popped up for Magician so I installed it. After it opened I saw a big fat yellow and orange circle spinning in my face saying the drive health is "Fair". It only has 15.3TB written which is practically nothing given the rated TBW. Percentage Used is at 1%. What's throwing the flag is Available Spare in SMART data. It's sitting at 17%, and the threshold is 10%. Normally available spare should be closer to 100%. Everything else looks good.

Has anyone ever seen this before or know why it's so low?
 
No, and that's usually a warning flag for drive failure. Does the drive have a heat sink on it? Are temps for it good?
 
Yeah, it's using the heatsink that came with the motherboard. Current idle temp on the drive is 39C or 103F.

If this thing is going to croak I should get a new drive and image it before it decides to let go.
 
I went ahead and ordered a Samsung 980 PRO 1TB from Amazon. Should be here later today.
 
Just curious, if you load up HWiNFO what does it say for that drive under the S.M.A.R.T. sensor section?

Should be a few different lines for Drive Remaining Life, Drive Failure, and Drive Warning.

Just wondering if HWiNFO will corroborate what Samsung Magician is saying.
 
I'd try to RMA the drive. That's fairly young to be failing, especially with only 15TB of write.
 
Man, what a shitshow lol ... I should have just tried to clone the drive when it was still up and working. I've got an external USB NVMe enclosure I could have put the new drive in and went from there. Instead I decided to blow the dust out and rearrange a couple fans beforehand. Between turning it off to do that and back on again the drive decided to bite the big one.

It's no longer bootable and fails the self test in the BIOS if it doesn't lock it up instead when trying. At least the BIOS sees the drive. I tried bootable clone software and that failed. Can't CHKDSK it to fix any possible errors because it's supposedly write protected (possibly due to it reaching the limit of available spares). Now I'm using R-Studio bootable emergency software to recover files off of it. Seems to be working so far. Going to have to do a fresh Windows install on the new drive. Should I stick with 10 or try 11? Heh

I'll definitely be trying to claim a warranty replacement on it. Totally unacceptable for it to die with so little TBW.

Sent from my Moto G (5) Plus using Tapatalk
 
If you have an HDR monitor definitely go Win 11. Auto HDR for games is a must have feature, IMHO.
 
I've been back up and running since about midnight. Now the long arduous task of reinstalling everything and getting all the settings where I like them.

This new drive is blazing fast BTW :drool:

mEqQnAg.png


I'm glad I was able to save some important stuff off the failing drive like my Firefox profile and a few other things. For things like Documents, Downloads, Pictures, etc I've got them on another drive (HDD). I bought a license for R-Studio after I saw that it was able to see all the files on the drive in demo mode. Well worth the $60.
 
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