SSD Life Left failure after 13 months use

[david44]

I'm not too impressed to see I have a 'SSD life left error' after just 13 months of use.

The drive in question is a KINGSTON SV300S37A120G purchased as part of desktop purchase from PC specialist in November last year.
The drive is holding the 'C:\' partition with my windows 10 installation.

Other than the 'windows detected a hard disk problem' I'm not seeing any unusual problems just yet.

The SSD life error is reported by running a disk check application from a company called passmark.

My questions are:

1) Does this sound normal?
2) Other than replace the disk, is their anything I can do?


David

 

[Wozza63]

The SSD should be covered under a manufacturer warranty. You may need to go through PCS first though and they will advise you on how to get it replaced. It may or may not be replaced via PCS.

 

[mantadog]

You may just be outside the warranty window, as the warranty info on the Kingston site says

Product Warranty Based on Three Years or SSD Life Left Value:
The following Kingston products are covered by this warranty for one of the following periods, whichever occurs first: (i) three years from the date of purchase by the original end user customer or (ii) until the date when the usage of the drive as measured by Kingston’s implementation of the SMART attribute 231 “SSD Life Remaining” reaches a normalised value of one (1) as reported by the Kingston SSD Manager (KSM): UV300 Series SSDs

Personally I would replace the disk, the v300 has terrible reviews and for a little extra you can get something with much better speed and write endurance like the Samsung 850 or the hyper x fury. The speed and write life on the v300 are very poor so I wouldn't be surprised if you had worn it out even if you do only fairly light writing to the drive.

 

[david44]

Thanks for replies... i think i need to replace the disk with something better. Kingston using a lifetime counter approach to void the warranty is open to abuse by the manufacturer in my opinion. Certainly its lead to a lack of trust in my case. If it helps anyone else reading this thread i also wonder if allowing a windows 8 to windows 10 upgrade to occur on that ssd was a mistake that caused many writes and a few months later triggered the end-of-life errors on the ssd?

 

[mantadog]

Basically Kingston is usually a good brand, however they have messed up countless times on the V300 series for some unfathomable reason. They nerfed the memory chips inside by replacing them with much slower modules so you cant even get the advertised speed anymore.

Using the life count is a perfectly reasonable way for a manufacturer to decide if they will provide warranty support or not as SSD's do wear out over time. Just some don't have quite the wear resistance of others.

I don't think updating to windows 10 will have made that much difference. I don't know the numbers for the v300 but I know the drive I use (840 evo) has a claimed total writes of 100TB for the 120GB model with real world testing showing about 80TB so compare that to the size of a windows installation and your not looking at much of an impact even if the numbers for the v300 are significantly smaller.

 

[Wozza63]

That is really poor by Kingston. I'm surprised they are allowed to sell them.

My Intel one is still going strong despite being 4 years old and has a 7 year warranty on it.

 

[LFFPicard]

Ouch, that is poor on Kingstons part.
The only thing I can think of for the short lifespan is the pagefile. Had you disabled/moved this to another drive? This uses a lot of read/writes that can shorten the lifespan. Also while I think of it hibernate does as well so had you made sure that was disabled?

I would of thought with SSD's being so mainstream now Microsoft would of had some kind of profile you can choose that disables these automatically if you say your running a SSD.

 

[Wozza63]

Ouch, that is poor on Kingstons part.
The only thing I can think of for the short lifespan is the pagefile. Had you disabled/moved this to another drive? This uses a lot of read/writes that can shorten the lifespan. Also while I think of it hibernate does as well so had you made sure that was disabled?

I would of thought with SSD's being so mainstream now Microsoft would of had some kind of profile you can choose that disables these automatically if you say your running a SSD.

I do believe hibernate is disabled by default on SSD machines.

 

[mantadog]

I would of thought with SSD's being so mainstream now Microsoft would of had some kind of profile you can choose that disables these automatically if you say your running a SSD.

MS do enable it as default with SSD's, in older versions of windows you do need to do it manually but software is bundled with the drives to do it all in one operation.

Its all well and good those of us with Samsung or intel drives saying its poor from Kingston but you do always have to remember, you get what you pay for. Intel offers a 7 year warranty for a reason, the drives they make cost more.