Estimated Life Remaining 1% But Only 18TB written?

[SamboNZ]

Hey guys,

The Intel Memory and Storage Tool shows the 'Estimated Life Remaining' for my Intel 535 SSD at 1%, yet the 'Host Writes' is only sitting at around 18TB according to IMAS and Crystal Disk Info.

THAT SAID, the 'Total NAND Writes' is ~160TB...

As far as I can ascertain, the TBW for this drive is 73TB (I can't find an official figure on Intel's site).

I assume that the latter figure is the real one to look at and the difference is 'Write Amplification'?

8x write amplification seems to be a lot, but then again it has spent all of it's 8 years of life as the system drive for a computer that is constantly in use for 12+hrs every day of the year and , so perhaps it's not that surprising. (That's at least 35,000 hours in operation for those of you playing at home!)

Anyway, I'm not sure whether to be offended that it's only lasted for 25% of it's expected lifespan or amazed that it lasted for 220%! On the other hand, regardless of anything else, hasn't missed a beat for 8 years straight so I guess I should be grateful either way!

The other question I have would be; is this a death sentence for the drive, or is it possible that it will continue to live a healthy and productive life well into its twilight years?

According to some torture tests I've seen, ordinary consumer SSDs can last WELL beyond their rated lifespan. That test featured an older Intel 335 which worked fine for 750TB of writes!

So maybe it's not the end after all?

Any insights from someone in the know would be much appreciated!

[JosafathB_Intel]

Hello SamboNZ,

Thank you for your reply.

To answer your questions:

As mentioned in the article named My Intel SSD have high NAND writes (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000027328/memory-and-storage/client-ssds.ht...)

Write amplification (WA) is an undesirable phenomenon associated with flash memory and solid-state drives (SSDs) where the actual amount of information physically written to the storage media is a multiple of the logical amount intended to be written.

This phenomenon has been observed on the Intel SSDs. The process and formulas that we use to calculate this factor are not part of the public information.

The Write Amplification Factor (WAF) depends on the workload and drive configuration. For 100% sequential write workloads, the Write Amplification Factor is roughly 1. However, for workloads that have substantial amounts of random writes, the Write Amplification Factor is higher than 1 because of defragmentation overhead.

The Total NAND Writes will be the best factor to check when calculating the amount of data written to the drive. During a determined amount of time.

As mentioned in our previous communication, our recommendation will be to replace this SSD as soon as possible to avoid future issues.

We will not close this thread, and you can still post and share your findings with the community. If you need assistance related to another Intel® product, please do not hesitate to contact us back by opening a new thread, and please submit a new question. We will no longer monitor this thread.

We hope fellow community members have the knowledge to jump in and help.

Best regards,

Josh B.

Intel® Customer Support Technician.