topic Re: Intel SSD 750 Wear Leveling Count in Solid State Drives (NAND)

Intel SSD 750 Wear Leveling Count

JBrow23 — Sat, 05 Sep 2015 04:43:44 GMT

Hi there,

I just purchased a retail box fresh new SSD 750 and installed Windows 10 on it. It's working well and the test speed is good. owever, I ran Intel SSD Toolbox 3.3.1 on it and checked its SMART attributes. Here is what I got.

The raw figure of "AD Wear Leveling Count" is way too large and it's growing every day. I didn't use the drive to do much except installing Windows 10 on it. Is this normal or not?

Also, what does the Minimum/Maximum/Average erase cycles mean? The figures seems to be changing.

And, can anybody tell me how to find read and written TBA measurement?

Thanks for help!

Update: Using another utility, AIDA64, I had new readings regarding Wear Leveling Count (Raw). It's much smaller figure now, but considering my other SSD's usually being 0 for this count, I'm very worrying about this drive. Did I receive a bad drive?

Re: Intel SSD 750 Wear Leveling Count

jbenavides — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 17:56:28 GMT

Hello Johnytec,

The Intel® SSD 750 Series is a NVMe PCIe drive, and in some things it is different from previous generation SSD's. The information presented by some SMART attributes has changed, so it is displayed in a different way.

From the information you provided, it seems your drive is working correctly, and it has taken a minimum amount of the expected wear. Here is some information that will help you understand this a little better:

The Raw amount shown for the Wear Leveling Count is actually the decimal presentation of a binary number. The Raw binary value is composed of different bytes that contain the information necessary for the Intel® SSD Toolbox to determine the values that are relevant for the user:

- Minimum erase cycles

- Maximum erase cycles

- Average erase cycles

- Normalized value

Since the different bytes indicate amounts that are independent from each other, and they change continuously; when they are shown in decimal form as a single number, it is expected to be very high, and it only becomes meaningful when the toolbox extracts the relevant information from it.

In your case, it indicates that the Minimum erase cycles is 2, Maximum erase cycles is 4, and Average erase cycles is 3.

The most important one is actually the Normalized value: 100. This decrements from 100 to 0 as the blocks of the drive are written to/erased. Since it still shows 100, it means that the drive erase cycles haven't reached even 1% of the rated/maximum number of erase/programming cycles.

For more information, you can review the following documents:

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-specifications/ssd-750-spec.pdf Intel® SSD 750 Series - Product Specification

Re: Intel SSD 750 Wear Leveling Count

JBrow23 — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 14:52:38 GMT

Jonathan,

Thank you so much for such a detailed explanation. Now I understand why the raw value been changing in that way.

I just purchased this drive so it's fresh new with every value very small. I'm quite satisfied with this drive, and actually I'm using it in a Pci-e x16 slot on a Z77 mainboard, Asrock Z77 Extreme 4, and currently I'm using it as OS drive loaded with Windows 10 Enterprise. It is working well. Startup time is very short, and I can barely see the loading Windows logo. Awesome work, Intel!

Re: Intel SSD 750 Wear Leveling Count

jbenavides — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 16:38:56 GMT

I am glad that we were able to answer your question. Feel free to use the /community/tech/solidstate/content Solid State Drives Communities for any new inquiries about your Intel SSD.