New order with 7TB already put through an SSD

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simonball598

New member
I just received a new build and I installed Samsung magician to check out my drives. I have a 250gb 970 Evo m.2 and it's showing 7TB total bytes has already been written to it. Is this from their testing? SSD's write limit may be better than they used to be but this seems to be an extreme amount to throw on a brand new SSD.

I have a year old SSD that doesn't even have that many bytes written to it.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Funny you should mention that, I'd not heard of the issue before until yesterday when this person said:

Now then, going back briefly to the issue of the 7TB of writes to the laptop M.2... I installed the Magician software on this new PC and guess what - it says the M.2 drive has had 12.6TB of writes to the drive! Now I was wondering what the heck is going on here? Again, I picked up the phone to inform PCS and after taking all the details the chap said he would speak to the technicians and managers to try and get to the bottom of this. It turns out that the drive in the laptop wasn't second hand or anything (I never thought it was to be honest) and what was going on is that due to the incredible speed of the M.2 drives, during the "burn in" phase of testing, the programs they run to do the burn in were actually writing that much data to the drives overnight. PCS said they will now be looking in to that and maybe changing things.
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https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/foru...ialist-Journey&p=429392&viewfull=1#post429392

If you're concerned about lifespan / endurance or just generally that it's disappointing in a new system, I'd suggest you give PCS a call to discuss. Whether you want action on your system, or just to make the point that this is indeed a lot of writes for a new drive.
 
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simonball598

New member
Thanks for your speedy reply, I am glad I am not the only one that's experienced this. I will be contacting PCS as this will affect the lifespan of the drive.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
While you're of course right, just to observe that the drive has a warranty for 150TBW or 5 years. So on the one had that's almost 5% of the warranty. But on the other hand, you say your year old SSD didn't even have 7TB writes to it. And drives tend to long outlast the published endurance figures too.

So do press this with PCS (I certainly would), but if you are personally worried about the lifespan of your drive, there are some reasons to not necessarily be as concerned as one might be :)
 
Scott

Scott

Behold The Ford Mondeo
Moderator
As above, most high end drives will see 1PB+ nowadays so I personally wouldn't be worried about it. I agree though, 7TB for testing is very excessive.
 
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Tony1044

Prolific Poster
The_Scotster said:
As above, most high end drives will see 1PB+ nowadays so I personally wouldn't be worried about it. I agree though, 7TB for testing is very excessive.
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Actually, I would be concerned by this myself. As oussebon points out, 7TB is 5% of it's warranty and 12.6TB is pushing up towards 10% of the warranty and to me, what is concerning is the fact that a) 7TB written to a 250GB SSD means the equivalent of 28 full disk writes just in testing - even with trim and wear levelling that is excessive. b) it is a LOT of data in a very short time and isn't the way you'd expect a laptop/desktop drive to be normally used and of course c) users wouldn't normally know that their SSD's had been through this. Imagine a failure in the warranty only to be told actually, no, it's written past its life? I wouldn't be pleased and I can't think anyone else would, either.
 
Scott

Scott

Behold The Ford Mondeo
Moderator
Tony1044 said:
Actually, I would be concerned by this myself. As oussebon points out, 7TB is 5% of it's warranty and 12.6TB is pushing up towards 10% of the warranty and to me, what is concerning is the fact that a) 7TB written to a 250GB SSD means the equivalent of 28 full disk writes just in testing - even with trim and wear levelling that is excessive. b) it is a LOT of data in a very short time and isn't the way you'd expect a laptop/desktop drive to be normally used and of course c) users wouldn't normally know that their SSD's had been through this. Imagine a failure in the warranty only to be told actually, no, it's written past its life? I wouldn't be pleased and I can't think anyone else would, either.
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I totally agree with all of that, it just wouldn't worry me that's all. I would still be expecting a response/reaction from PCS regarding it but I wouldn't be worried about the impending doom of the HDD, that's all.
 
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Shepard

Enthusiast
Hi guys,

this is indeed a thing we here in the call center have noticed, as simonball598 isn't the first one to notice. After speaking to my supervisor about this, I don't have a response yet and will update here, as soon as I have. :)
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I did some limited research on modern SSDs before I bought my M.2 NVMe SSD and found that the old adage that you should reduce the number of writes to them is no longer true. A modern SSD can sustain more writes that you'll probably ever do before upgrading the PC!

It's now my considered opinion that the number of writes you do to a modern SSD is no longer a real-world consideration. My pagefile is back on my SSD for example (and you want that on your fastest device). We don't worry about the number of writes to an HDD and neither should we worry about the number of writes to an modern SSD.

In addition, if you're going to properly test a modern SSD you have to perform a large number of writes to be sure the wear-leveling mechanism operates and thus prove that the drive is good.
 
Stephen M

Stephen M

Author Level
Agree with Ubuysa, SSDs have improved drastically in the last few years. I think that amount of testing is worth it, the PCS response will be interesting to see.
 
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Tony1044

Prolific Poster
ubuysa said:
I did some limited research on modern SSDs before I bought my M.2 NVMe SSD and found that the old adage that you should reduce the number of writes to them is no longer true. A modern SSD can sustain more writes that you'll probably ever do before upgrading the PC!

It's now my considered opinion that the number of writes you do to a modern SSD is no longer a real-world consideration. My pagefile is back on my SSD for example (and you want that on your fastest device). We don't worry about the number of writes to an HDD and neither should we worry about the number of writes to an modern SSD.

In addition, if you're going to properly test a modern SSD you have to perform a large number of writes to be sure the wear-leveling mechanism operates and thus prove that the drive is good.
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Stephen M said:
Agree with Ubuysa, SSDs have improved drastically in the last few years. I think that amount of testing is worth it, the PCS response will be interesting to see.
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But if you have a manufacturer that warrants a drive for xxxTB written to it, do you really want to receive a brand new system with 5%-10% (possibly more) of that total already written?
 
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Lez501

Gold Level Poster
I agree with Tony too. It may not seem a great deal if you are buying pro drives with 600 TBW, or more. However, will PCS carry out the same test cycles on smaller, less robust drives that only have 100TBW rating, or less (there are still smaller drives around that do)
 
Scott

Scott

Behold The Ford Mondeo
Moderator
Lez501 said:
I agree with Tony too. It may not seem a great deal if you are buying pro drives with 600 TBW, or more. However, will PCS carry out the same test cycles on smaller, less robust drives that only have 100TBW rating, or less (there are still smaller drives around that do)
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It'll be relative to the drive speed. The issue has came around due to the fact that the modern M2 drives are so fast. More conventional drives wouldn't get close to those sort of write volumes.
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Tony1044 said:
But if you have a manufacturer that warrants a drive for xxxTB written to it, do you really want to receive a brand new system with 5%-10% (possibly more) of that total already written?
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Personally I would not be interested in buying any drive that had a 70TB write limit...
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
I think the 5-10% thing related to the user who saw 12.something TB written to their drive.

May have been a larger drive, therefore faster so wrote more data. And the endurance limit might be higher too. So wouldn't have been 10%.

But even 5% of the drive's warranty having been eaten is a bit much...

Not quite the same but it would be a bit like buying a CPU cooler with a 5 year warranty and being told actually it's only 4 years and 9 months because someone already used it for 3 months. Won't make a practical difference for most people, but doesn't inspire confidence, takes the shine off, and does feel like you're not quite getting what you paid for.
 
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Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Oussebon said:
I think the 5-10% thing related to the user who saw 12.something TB written to their drive.

May have been a larger drive, therefore faster so wrote more data. And the endurance limit might be higher too. So wouldn't have been 10%.

But even 5% of the drive's warranty having been eaten is a bit much...

Not quite the same but it would be a bit like buying a CPU cooler with a 5 year warranty and being told actually it's only 4 years and 9 months because someone already used it for 3 months. Won't make a practical difference for most people, but doesn't inspire confidence, takes the shine off, and does feel like you're not quite getting what you paid for.
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Yes indeed - I was assuming the same sized drive to be fair, which would make the 12.xTB around 9%

Another analogy is if you bought a brand new car, with a 60,000 mile, 5 year warranty only to find it was delivered to you with 3,000 or 6,000 miles on the clock... Something tells me you'd be less sanguine about that. And yet, no one would suggest that said car would be any more likely to suddenly fail, either.
 
Oussebon

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
It was a 1TB 970 Evo as it happens (there's a link to the chap's topic).

As a side note I guess that means the 1TB 970 Evo really is is quite a bit faster than the 250gb 970 Evo if PCS's burn in was running for the same amount of time...

SEQUENTIAL WRITE
250 GB: Up to 1,500 MB/s
500 GB : Up to 2,300 MB/s
1,000 GB, 2,000 GB: Up to 2,500 MB/s
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/consumer/970evo/


So it's not just good for synthetic benchmarks, there's a real world use case where PCS will be able to do almost 50% more writes to your drive before it ships (!)

The 1TB 970 Evo has 600TBW warranty, for ref.

Another analogy is if you bought a brand new car, with a 60,000 mile, 5 year warranty only to find it was delivered to you with 3,000 or 6,000 miles on the clock... Something tells me you'd be less sanguine about that. And yet, no one would suggest that said car would be any more likely to suddenly fail, either.
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I was hoping someone would do the car analogy as it's a good one and that's put better than I could :)
 
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andrewhawkins986

Bronze Level Poster
Checked my new system after seeing this topic, and it has 11TB written to it so far. Admittedly, I've had it for a couple of days, but I've just been installing software and the like really. Yes, that will have upped the count somewhat, but 11TB seems awfully high.

SMART data is reporting '0% used', although I don't know exactly what that figure refers to on this drive.

Will be interested to hear PCS's take on this.

Andy
 
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