How do I check the health of a SSD?
We all know that SSDs have a limited predetermined life span. So the question for me is how do I check in (Ubuntu) Linux what the current health status of my SSD is? And maybe an estimation how long it will take? Graphical tool is preferred, but command line tool would also be fine. I’m using Xubuntu 12.04 LTS
@dschinn1001 Not exactly, that only applies to recent SSDs. First and Second generation SSD are known to have limited lifespan according to the amount of write operations to the disk.
Coming from old school spinning drives, I used tools for testing HD that wrote and read all the disk a few times, which took a few hours. It seems that none of the tools mentioned use such an approach? Does such an approach not make sense for SSD? Well, then it seems that the SSD logs it’s own experiences, and can then tell if it is ailing. Have I understood this correctly?
@MadsSkjern It’s perfectly feasible to use a tool like badblocks to check the status of an SSD. There are however very good reasons to NOT do so. SSD’s in my experience typically fail after exceeding a certain threshold of writes, so a destructive read write test such as can be performed with badblocks can actually shorten the life of the drive.
9 Answers 9
to check the health of a SSD
For Ubuntu, Mint, or Debian based distributions
# apt-get install smartmontools The Media_Wearout_Indicator is what you are looking for. For 100 means your ssd has 100% life, the lower number means less life left.
# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Media_Wearout_Indicator To show your sdd information
That property does not appear in my SSD. Maybe I should look at Wear_Leveling_Count instead? as in: sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Wear_Leveling_Count EDIT: Confirmed by the response below: askubuntu.com/a/381779/221115
Install Gnome Disk Utility and check SMART Data and Tests for wear-leveling-count or similar. The higher that number (%, from 1 to 100), the more «used up» your SSD is, which means you are more likely to have problems. But if you have a recent SSD, you need not worry about it.
sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility either menu->Settings->Disk utility
palimpsest is not recognized by Ubuntu 14.04, although gnome-disk-utility is installed. I also don’t see a disk utility in settings (gear icon). palimpsest is an awful name, does the name vary with user language (e.g. english vs. something else).
as a note to readers; palimpset is renamed to gnome-disks ( as mentioned askubuntu.com/a/623306/4580 ).
You got this backwards. The wear number starts at 100 and decreases with usage, so the higher the number, the LESS used is the SSD, see here: superuser.com/questions/1037644/…
If you don’t have an Intel-brand SSD: READ THIS.
Watch out !! — I was blithely mislead by ‘smartmontools.’ I have a Samsung SSD, and the smartmonitor/’smartctl’ tool happily misreported that ‘233’ (hex ‘E9’) attribute was ‘Media_Wearout_Indicator’; in fact — no, for Samsung (and other manufacturers) it is up to entirely different. This and other forum postings, stack-exchange question/answers, and power-user blogs I found seem to be ‘Intel focused,’ with only vague hints that ‘it may vary.’ (Versus any suggestion that you need to watch out for wrong and erroneous labeling of the attribute by smartmontools).
As I was preparing to copy my SSD to a new harddrive I’d bought (because of what smartmontools had told me), I booted to windows (I have a dual boot system), to learn something about SSD’s from what the windows-only Samsung tool ‘Samsung_Magician_v43.exe’ had to tell me about my drive — it was shockingly uninformative.
After what’s been hours of digging — I’ve finally been able to run the windows only tools: hddgaurdian, and then also CrystalDiskInfo: Surprise! both tools independently tell me my Samsung SSD is ‘just fine’ (hdd guardian says ‘5 stars’ and Crystal Disk «98% OK»). By contrast the smartctl tool explicitly labeled the attribute with ‘decimal- 233 / ‘hex- E9’ as «Media Wearout Indicator» — and told me its value was «1» or 1% — an indicator of (the risk of) pending failure. To be as sure as I can, I dug and dug and was finally able to locate at least something from Samsung official: Samsung White Paper 07: Communicating With Your SSD [archive.org]
The document indeed implies that the attribute ‘hex E9’ /’decimal ‘233’ is not used by Samsung the same way. ( Samsung: I’m very disappointed, please either fix your official software-tool, or at least make it clear that you do not provide wear out indication information!)
Further — if you have neither an Intel SSD nor Samsung SSD — be warned, this info does seem to vary across manufacturers. ( e.g. see the attribute label chart on https://code.google.com/p/hddguardian/wiki/about_reliability for the only useful indication of the degree of variability that I found. )
The so-what: If you don’t have an Intel SSD— do not be mislead by the false attribute name labels provided by smartmonitor. Perhaps it will improve in the future, but the version installed by default for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (April, 2014) was total fail. Instead of telling you it ‘doesn’t know’ — smartctl just mislabeled the attribute. I did not find another tool for linux that made the ‘correct’ information transparent or clear.
How can I check the NVME specs
How can I check the specs of the installed NVME other than lshw which only shows the brand. I am looking to know the model and voltage/power. Moreover, is there anything one should know before buying a new one to replace another (e.g. like SSDs, voltage and power)? CPU: i7-7700HQ
As far as I’m aware, NVMe is a standard, not a piece of hardware. So when you say «the installed NVMe», are you referring to the mobo/interface/connector, SSD, or something else?
2 Answers 2
lsblk (List Block)
You can use lsblk command:
$ lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,MOUNTPOINT,SIZE,MODEL NAME FSTYPE LABEL MOUNTPOINT SIZE MODEL sdb 186.3G 2105 ├─sdb2 ntfs S3A6550D005 /media/rick/ 178.9G ├─sdb3 ntfs HDDRECOVERY 6G └─sdb1 ntfs TOSHIBA SYSTEM VOLUME 1.5G sda 931.5G HGST HTS721010A9 ├─sda4 ntfs WINRETOOLS 450M ├─sda2 128M ├─sda5 ntfs Image 11.4G ├─sda3 ntfs HGST_Win10 /mnt/d 919G └─sda1 vfat ESP 500M nvme0n1 477G Samsung SSD 960 PRO 512GB ├─nvme0n1p5 ext4 NVMe_Ubuntu_16.0 / 44.6G ├─nvme0n1p3 16M ├─nvme0n1p1 ntfs 450M ├─nvme0n1p6 swap Linux Swap [SWAP] 7.9G ├─nvme0n1p4 ntfs NVMe_Win10 /mnt/c 414.9G ├─nvme0n1p2 vfat /boot/efi 99M └─nvme0n1p7 ntfs Shared_WSL+Linux /mnt/e 9G You can see my NVMe SSD is a Samsung SSD 960 PRO 512GB
Create an alias for arguments
As pointed out in comments a typo was made for MODEL and the output was incomplete. To avoid that in the future and more importantly so you don’t have to remember the arguments create an alias in ~/.bashrc called lsdrv which you can use all the time:
$ cat ~/.bashrc | grep lsdrv # Create lsdrv version of lsblk without UUID's alias lsdrv="lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,MOUNTPOINT,SIZE,MODEL" Now in the terminal you can simply use lsdrv to see all your drives complete with model number and other useful information.
Voltage / Power
This is pretty much irrelevant. The deciding factor is M.2 22×80 mm size or a different size. Also whether if it is Gen 3 x 2 or Gen 3 x 4 speed (the second is twice as fast).
For example I have two M.2 SSD bays the first one supports Gen 3 x 4 speeds the second one only supports Gen 3 x 2 speeds because there are a limited number of PCIe lanes on the Skylake chipset.
There may be other issues but this is what I remember off the top of my head. You should of course do your own research.
Basically you need to know the make and model of your computer to know the make and models of the M.2 NVMe SSDs you can install in it.