Ubuntu – How to check the health of a SSD

disk-checkhardware-testssd

We all know that SSDs have a limited predetermined life span.
So the question for me is how do I check in (Ubuntu) Linux what the current health status of my SSD is? And maybe an estimation how long it will take?

Graphical tool is preferred, but command line tool would also be fine.

I'm using Xubuntu 12.04 LTS

Best Answer

Install Gnome Disk Utility and check SMART Data and Tests for wear-leveling-count or similar. The higher that number (%, from 1 to 100), the more "used up" your SSD is, which means you are more likely to have problems. But if you have a recent SSD, you need not worry about it.

Installed via

 sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility

start it via

either menu->Settings->Disk utility

or via command line

sudo gnome-disks

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I have had similar issues before, particularly with flash drives. To fix the issue with gparted not seeing the disk try erasing the beginning of the disk with:

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Then unplug and plug in your usb adapter. This will nuke the partition table on the ssd and should allow gparted to see the disk again.

It is also important to add:

  && sync

When working with dd and a device connected over usb. This is because most operating systems will cache data in ram to make usb disks appear to write faster. The sync command will force this data to be written to disk and prevent data loss/corruption.

As for copying data to your ssd with dd, it should work in principle, but you may not be able to do it in practice. I personally have had mixed luck when doing this, sometimes it works flawlessly, others not at all.

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It should be preferred to silence logging instead of disabling it (otherwise you might miss something important).

For systemd prior to version 235 you can use

journalctl --priority=3

For newer versions there is parameter in

/etc/systemd/journald.conf

called ReadKMsg= that you need to enable. Make a backup and edit the file; remove the # in front of #ReadKMsg=yes and change yes to no (you can also insert a new line under this one with ReadKMsg=no.

changelog version 235:

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I've often read that the number of writes to FLASH is limited, but this is the first concrete example of failure that I have heard about.

The change above is not going to matter a lot though in regards to writes to the SSD as writing is done sparsely. Then again every 1 less write is 1 less write :)

What might be an issue for Tesla: those SSDs they used might be pretty old disks. And the older SSDs did have issues. Nowadays... not so much.

Best Answer

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