Intel 750 SSD Wear Leveling Very High despite little use

[AVill15]

I have been using this Intel 750 Series PCI-e 400GB drive since December 9th 2015. It has been slightly over 2 months.

I bought it brand new and I am the only person who ever uses this computer, and I know what kind of tasks the computer is doing.

The Intel SSD Toolbox is reading 83% Wear Leveling Indicator, meaning I have used up 17% of my drive life in only 2 months. How is this possible?

Using another tool (AIDA64 extreme 5.60.3700) = which is one of the only tools i've found that can properly interpret the SMART attributes, shows me having 1.42TB Read and 10.43TB Written. (And 73 power-on-days aka 1767 hours). These numbers make sense and match with my idea of my actual usage... since I use this as my OS Drive (Windows 10) and I have 270GB free out of 372GB (and that has not changed +/-2gb for the past 2 months). My computer has not been storing large files or doing anything intensive or abnormal.

I can't think of any plausible reason why I would be down to 83% Wear leveling. I checked multiple things: My partition is 4KB Aligned, my OS TRIM functionality is enabled (fsutil), I am using the latest firmware (Since I got it), and I'm using the Intel's own NVME driver (not windows's one).

I also checked with several people online who have the same drive, and their drives are showing 99%, and they use their drives more heavily than I do.

[18:45:57] my 750 has 16tb written and 99% health

This person has the 800GB model and he is using the same AIDA64 to read the info. I checked in the datasheet that these drives all have the same endurance rating of 127 TBW,

Even if you try and calculate manually, 10.43 TB written so far, out of 127 TBW lifetime = 0.082125 aka 8.2%, So that would really be 91.8%, not 83%........ So even that doesn't make sense.

Also, I have no idea how to interpret the F4 and F5 attributes in Intel SSD Toolbox (NAND Bytes Written and Host Bytes Written) - Please inform me of how to decode these into Gigabytes Read/Written.

Please respond, and thank you for your help working with the Intel community.

-Abei

[jbenavides]

Hello Abei,

Here are some relevant aspects regarding Wear Leveling and SSD relialibity.

- The Wear Leveling count is based on the Erase Cycles, not on host or NAND writes, so those values will not be proportional between them. Wear leveling is more accurate to measure the actual wear of the NAND chips.

- We will check further on the NAND and Host bytes written values when shown for the Intel® SSD 750 Series. In order to provide more accurate recommendations we would like to get the details of your system (PC details, SSD driver and firmware version, OS, etc). The best method is to obtain the SSD toolbox log from your drive, this can done with the "Export" button in the Drive Summary of Intel® SSD 750.

Once you get the file, please attach it to the thread using the Advanced Editor. Or, let me know if you would like to provide the log privately.

[AVill15]

OK, sure erase cycles do not relate to host/nand writes. But I have plenty of space available on the drive, I'm not sure why it would be so heavily erasing things.

Also in the past day, the percentage has now gone down to 82%.

Windows 10 Pro x64

Intel 750 SSD PCi-e 400GB

Intel SSD Toolbox version 3.3.3

Intel Windows NVMe driver 1.3.0.1007

[jbenavides]

Hello Abei,

The report shows that the drive is healthy, but it also confirms that the Write amplication is high. The high WAF and the amount of host writes are causing the increase of wear leveling count.

As you have suggested this is not normal behavior. Keep in mind that the type of workload impacts WAF, for example: random writing of small files normally results in higher WAF.

There are some other aspects that I noticed in the log, that are worth looking into:

- Is the system using any technology that may be causing additional writes to the drive? such as power saving, fast boot, caching technologies, etc. If so, try disabling them.

- Take into consideration that to use the Intel® SSD 750 Series as a Bootable drive, your system must meet the requirements mentioned in the document: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/solid-state-drives/consumer-ssds/000005797.html Before You Buy for Solid State Drives

- From the log, the SSD is working with PCIe* 2.0, and it requires PCIe* 3.0, also the CPU and storage chipset suggest that the motherboard does not have an Intel® Z97 Chipset, an Intel® X99 Chipset, or newer. If the PC does not have full support to boot from NVMe*, it may cause unexpected behavior.

For additional assistance, please let us know the brand and model of your computer/motherboard, as well as the BIOS version.

Also, install https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/23931/Intel-Solid-State-Drive-Data-Center-Tool Intel® SSD Data Center Tool, and use the tool to create a dump file of the NVMElog. The instructions are in pages 29-33 of the https://downloadmirror.intel.com/23931/eng/Intel_SSD_Data_Center_Tool_2_3_x_User_Guide_331961-005.pd... ISDCT v2.3.x User Guide (ISDCT is CLI tool that must be run as Administrator).