Samsung SSD 840 EVO 1TB and used-reserved-blocks-total

[jimhoyle]

So I got the winload.exe boot error. It turned out a few files had been broken on the drive suddenly, apparently some system files took the hit also in a critical way. Crystal Disk Info doesn't show any hard drive errors, but Ubuntu's Disks / SMART Data & Self-Tests does.

Everything is fine except for this:

Attribute ID 179: used-reserved-blocks-total, Value=0, Normalized=100, Threshold=10, Worst=1, Type=Pre-Fail
Assessment: Failed in the past

I full formatted the disk (took 8 hours). Then, using the same mentioned program, I did Self-test. Also took 8 hours, result: "Last self-test completed successfully".

Overall Assessment: "Disk is OK, one attribute failed in the past" (I do not know what this status was before the winload.exe error because I basically never had done the SMART test before the problems arose).

My question is, what exactly is this error on the drive? As the "Value" is 0, does it mean the Worst=1 is the problematic value? How reliable is this drive at this point?

 

[samuria]

If you get a bad block on the disk is going to fail and you need to get a new one and back up now. What confuses people is you test the drive and find errors they can't be repaired so they are marked as not usable so if you check again it shows no errors as the bad bits are now locked out. But it is bad an likely to fail

 

[jimhoyle]

The error message didn't change at all after formatting. But I don't understand the error message in the first place. I need help with that. So this is about "used-reserved-blocks-total". What value is perfect? 100 or 0? How do I read my current status, is it the Value or the Worst? (What is Normalized and Threshold?)

 

[LMiller7]

How reliable is this drive at this point?

Not reliable at all.

I have little tolerance for errors in a hard drive, either conventional or SSD. I may tolerate a few warnings in SMART but after boot failures or other symptoms it is time to replace the drive. I wouldn't try to analyze the problem or determine exactly what has happened or why. It just isn't worth the trouble. The drive isn't prone to failure, it has already failed.

The problem is that these errors tend to get worse over time. There is often some internal issue (usually unknowable) that is causing the errors. HD and SSD errors are not repairable. The most that you can do is cause the drive to map out failed sectors and even that is not always possible. But the underlying problem is still there. You might have 5 errors today and 5,000 tomorrow, or next week, or next month. You have no way of knowing what it will be.

Back in the 1980's you might purchase a 10 MB (yes 10 MB) drive for $1000 US. And that $1000 would buy a lot more then than now. Most people relied on floppy drives for storage because hard drives were just to expensive. At the time there was much effort expended on keeping a questionable drive running. With the costs involved that made sense. But now in 2018 drive costs are much lower and it is simply a waste of time and may cost you your data.

With conventional drives SMART is of some value but I think rather less with SSDs. They tend to fail without warning or apparent cause. Warnings usually mean there is a problem but the lack of them does not necessarily mean all is well. There can be issues in the drive that SMART knows nothing about. Any drive, new or old, can fail at any time and often do so with no warnings of any kind.

 

[Megahertz07]

Samsung SSDs has 5 year warranty.
You don't need a big SSD. I have a small (128G) SSD for windows and programs on one partition (85G) and Linux on another partition. For data I have a 1T HDD.
So I have the speed of a SSD and the space of a HDD. At very low cost.

 

[townsbg]

Maybe this will help.

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs)[1], and eMMC drives. Its primary function is to detect and report various indicators of drive reliability with the intent of anticipating imminent hardware failures.
When S.M.A.R.T. data indicates a possible imminent drive failure, software running on the host system may notify the user so preventative action can be taken to prevent data loss, and the failing drive can be replaced and data integrity maintained.

S.M.A.R.T. - Wikipedia.

 

[jimhoyle]

Haha, SMART Wikipedia page table has Used Reserved Block Count Total and the next column is Ideal=Low/High. But for that particular attribute it does NOT tell whether low or high is good (Value or Worst?). So I still don't understand what my error message is saying.

In the shop I use they have 3 years warranty on Samsung EVO and 5 years on Samsung PRO.

I'm not going to use this drive any more for my C: drive. But I still would need the exact information about the error because I don't want to throw it away. I am also not totally convinced that the drive is the original source for the "pre-fail". Because I just found out that my BIOS chip broke. 100% certain physical damage on BIOS and/or motherboard. My computer had weird symptoms for a long time. And the BIOS died just a little after the C: got messed up. So it's a coincidence if they both physically broke around at the same time (1 week apart). I think the broken component on the motherboard might've affected SSD somehow, SSD is not necessarily broken, at least hypothetically.

 

[samuria]

The way forward is to to makers website they normally have a free disk test specific for their drive they normally give a full report and you often need the report to get a replacement

 

[townsbg]

The purpose of the smart test isn't to tell you what's wrong or if something is wrong but that something is up and could be wrong. To determine if something is wrong you need to download the manufacturer's diagnostic tools and do a deep scan on the drive. Really it don't matter whats wrong because what ever it is you won't be able to fix it. The best thing for you to do now is run the scan and report it to the manufacturer for replacement.