[mikeloeven]

I have a question i have a new computer that is only a few months old but Speedfan reports that the smart attribute GMR Head Amplitude is Failing with a value of 2 and gave my drive a health rating of 9%. the thing is i am hearing that this attribute is related to mechanical drives and doesn't mean the same thing for SSD drives and this may be normal or simply not matter. can i get a definitive answer as to this really low value

Edited by mikeloeven, 10 January 2012 - 09:44 PM.

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An SSD drive has no read/write head, so that attribute is meaningless.

[admin]

An SSD drive has no read/write head, so that attribute is meaningless.

[mikeloeven]

i figured as much but was concerned that it might refer to a problem with the flash circuit but any way i need to write a bug report to speedfan regarding the inability to properly analyze SSD's

[admin]

I think it would be difficult for Speedfan to accurately report SMART as all not all SSD manufacturers support it, and have differing methods.

The most common method seems to be measuring the write cycles and reporting an expected life cycle from 100-1. However, there may still may be a lot of life left in a drive that reports 1 (nand cycles are approximate). Also, all SSD drives ship with "spare" memory blocks where failed blocks can be remapped. With enterprise drives this spare capacity is often up to 1/3 of the rated capacity. A lot of built in redundancy. Eventually, when those spare blocks are exhausted the SSD will exhibit errors. In this case you would have much more reliable information that the hard drive is failing then the SMART info usually presented for spinner drives.