easy way to tell if your SSD is failing

[idata]

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I work for a government contractor. We supply equipment to them that uses an SSD. This equipment runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week processing information. It has Win XP Pro so it is not an SSD "aware" OS.

It is my understanding that the average read/write lifespan for each cell is approximately 100K.

My question is this:

Is there a way to see this drive failing BEFORE it actually fails?

An example of this would be since we use a 32GB SSD, when I go to the drives properties it shows up as 29.8GB in Windows. As this drive starts failing because of individual cells going down, will this number change to reflect the current USABLE maximum space?

This would be a very easy way to tell that our SSDs are starting to fail.

What do you think? Is there a way to know before a drive fails?

Thanks in advance for your help

[idata]

Hi cloudkat,

I would suggest installing the Intel Toolbox. The only way of determining if the SSD has reached it's end of life is through the smart attributes. E9 looks like the field that would need to be monitored. The toolbox user guide says this:

" This attribute reports the number of cycles the NAND media has experienced. The normalized value declines linearly from 100 to 1 as the average erase cycle count increases from 0 to the maximum rated cycles. Once the nomalized value reaches 1, the number will not decrease, although it is likely that significant additional wear can be put on the use. Use the Normalized value for this attribute."

The maximum space of your drive is not an indicator of drive wear.