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PHaml · ‎01-14-2019

My company purchased a number of SSDs second hand; the seller said the SSDs came from a brand new system which was never used.

Examination of the SMART attributes for the Intel 320 series SSDs show E4 Workload Timer RAW Values up around 42000000 (decimal) and E2 Timed Workload Media Wear around 500000 (decimal).

Given the Seller's claim that the SSD has had little or no use, how can both the E4 Workload Timer & E2 Timed Workload Media Wear indicator show large counts while other SMART values remain at zero?

Can Intel SSD SMART Attributes be reset?

DiegoV_Intel · ‎01-16-2019

Hi Peter,

That’s correct. The Intel® SSD Toolbox will not recognize the drive if you are using adapters. You would have to connect the drive directly to the system in order to use the tool.

Anyhow, after checking the SMART data, it looks like the drives are new (or almost new). If you see the first drive, the SMART report shows that 282GB have been written while only 3GB have been read from it. The second drive reports that 0GB have been written to and read from the drive.

Regarding to the values of E2 and E4, they are respectively a counter and a timer used to measure the workload of the drive during a certain period of time. The E2, E3 and E4 attributes are used for this purpose, and I know it’s possible to reset the E4 value to perform measurements of the drive’s workload because this value is only a timer that counts minutes, but no other SMART attribute can be reset.

Below is a description of what the attributes E2, E3 and E4 mean according to document: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/memory-and-storage/intel-ssd-toolbox-user-...

E2 – Timed Workload, Media Wear: Measures the wear seen by the SSD (since reset of the Timed Workload Timer, attribute E4), as a percentage of the maximum rated cycles.
E3 – Timed Workload, Host Read/Write Ratio: The percentage of I/O operations that are read operations (since reset of the Timed Workload Timer, attribute E4).
E4 – Timed Workload Timer: Measures the elapsed time (number of minutes) since starting this workload timer.

You cannot reset the E4 value from the Intel® SSD Toolbox, but I found this online article that explains how to reset it and how to measure the drive performance so I will share it with you because it has interesting information that is useful for any SSD usage: https://www.anandtech.com/show/5518/a-look-at-enterprise-performance-of-intel-ssds/6

If you read the article, you will see that the reset value of the E4 timer is 65535 (decimal) which is just FFFF (hexadecimal), and then the timer starts from 0. Considering that the E4 value in the drives in the picture is very high (422802B7 hex and 22001BF hex) I would say that they have been never reset and their data is not useful at all, so it would be better to ignore it. According to this value, the first timer would have been running for 1109918391 minutes (decimal value of 422802B7h) which is not possible because that is equal to 2111 years.

It would be interesting to see the data directly from the Intel® SSD Toolbox to see what the value reported is. Based on the online article above, it should not be higher than 65535 (decimal).

Anyhow, after saying all this information, you can be sure that the SMART data cannot be reset and based on this fact, your drives have only been used for 3 and 1 hours respectively, so you can consider them as new.

The only value that can be reset is the E4 which is a timer used to measure the drive performance under certain workload during a period of time. The current value of your drives is simply not valid and it may be possible that they have that value from factory, although I cannot confirm it as I haven’t seen how the SMART data looks like in new drives.

If possible, please try to use the Intel® SSD Toolbox to get the SMART details from the drives and compare the numbers.

I hope you find this information useful as well as the information in the online article linked above

If there is anything else I can help you with, just let me know.

Have a nice day.

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

View solution in original post

DiegoV_Intel · ‎01-17-2019

Hi Peter,

I would like to know if there is anything else I can help you with, or if the information above clarified your concerns about the drives.

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

PHaml · ‎01-18-2019

Hi Diego,

Thanks for the information.

It is a shame that the Intel® SSD Toolbox will not recognize the drive across (non-Intel?) adapters - is there a reason for this limitation (as this does not seem to be an issue for 3rd party tools such as CrystalDiskInfo and SSD Life Pro)?

In addition the Intel® SSD Toolbox fails to read any SMART Attributes even for the Intel 320 300GB SSD - Windows 'C' drive - of the host computer (with internal Intel disk interface) to which the toolbox is installed.

As you say the obtained values for theE4 Workload Timer and E2 Timed Workload Media Wear make no sense ... while it is possible that both CrystalDiskInfo and SSD Life Pro both are somehow misreading the information from the Intel 320 Series SSD 600GB drives, however somehow I doubt it, as (i) both CrystalDiskInfo 8.0.0 and SSD Life Pro yield identical results & (ii) I connected an Intel 320 Series SSD 300GB drive that we have owned from new to the Tempo™ SATA Pro ExpressCard/34 and the SMART Attributes obtained for this drive appear consistent with 3 years light usage.

There is one more anomaly and that is when attempting to clone another Intel 320 300GB SSD - Windows 'C' drive - of another system to either BTPR318200BL600FGN or BTPR323101DD600FGN, described in the image above, so far the cloning process has failed.

Previously, the Sonnett ExpressCard adapter has been used to clone many HDs to SSDs without issue - but suddenly cloning one SSD to another SSD is a problem.

So far cloning software from Acronis, Macrium Reflect & EaseUs has been tried but all fail to clone the source drive.

Regards,

Peter H.

DiegoV_Intel · ‎01-18-2019

Hi Peter,

Thank you for the response.

Regarding to the adapter limitation, that’s just how the tool was designed. The SSD should be always connected directly to the motherboard, without using any adapters.

Now, regarding to the primary drive that you cannot read from the Intel® SSD Toolbox. Do you get any error message, or the drive is not recognized at all by the tool? I would like to know if the issue is that the drive is not recognized even in the main window of the tool, or if the issue is that you cannot export the SMART data or read it in the tool. If possible, please take a screenshot so that I can take a look at it.

Finally, regarding to the issue with the cloning process, it may be related to the adapter as well. I haven’t used all these cloning tools you are mentioning, but I know that the use of adapters when cloning the drives may cause issues.

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

DiegoV_Intel · ‎01-21-2019

Hi Peter,

Just wondering if there is anything else I can help you with.

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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Can Intel 320 Series SSD SMART Attributes be Reset?