Member Avatar for bryann

I bought an OCZ Vector SSD about 6-8 months ago for a new build and currently have Win 7 installed on it. I haven't had any problems yet (touch wood) and it still runs lovely and quick.
I installed and ran Astra32 today and it reports my SSD drive health status as being poor. Could this be correct? How accurate is that software? I was thinking maybe that only applies to the traditional HDDs and not SSDs as it has been a feature of it for a long time. Any thoughts would be appreciated

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Short expert summary tied to the thread: the right source for a suspected SSD problem is the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data, but different utilities can read and interpret those attributes differently — that explains why one tool can report "poor" while another reports "good." was correct to point at S.M.A.R.T. as the primary source; the most reliable next step is to capture and compare the raw S.M.A.R.T. values rather than trusting a single summary indicator. (smartmontools.com)

Why the mismatch happens: some S.M.A.R.T. attributes are vendor-specific and need explicit decoding. CrystalDiskInfo explicitly maps Indilinx (Barefoot 3) controllers to a vendor attribute (ID 0xD1) labelled "Remaining Drive Life" and uses that for its SSD health summary (Caution when remaining life <= 10%). The OCZ Vector uses OCZ/Indilinx Barefoot 3 firmware, so a tool that understands that vendor field will often give a different overall "health" than a generic scanner. (crystalmark.info)

Practical, non-invasive verification (order of preference): 1) make a current backup; 2) gather the raw S.M.A.R.T. dump from the drive (smartmontools/smartctl is the standard cross-platform tool), and save that output for comparison; 3) look specifically at Reallocated Sectors (0x05), Current Pending (0xC5), Uncorrectable (0xC6) and the Indilinx "Remaining Drive Life" / percentage-used fields — those are the values that actually predict imminent trouble. Example commands (adjust device name per OS):

# Linux
sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda

# Windows (from admin PowerShell)
smartctl --scan
smartctl --all /dev/sdX   # use the device name from --scan

Collect the raw output from both CrystalDiskInfo and smartctl and compare the numeric raw values rather than the single-word “Health.” (smartmontools.com)

Interpretation and follow-up: a rising reallocated/pending/uncorrectable count or a low vendor "remaining life" is a real red flag — back up and arrange replacement/RMA if under warranty. If raw numbers look normal, enable periodic S.M.A.R.T. checks and firmware/vendor-tool checks and keep backups; S.M.A.R.T. gives good early warnings but is not perfect, so preservation of data is the priority. (en.wikipedia.org)

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Member Avatar for rubberman

I don't know about Astra32, but if it is looking at the smart interface of the SSD, then it is probably correct. SMART is a tool on most all current drives that monitors in real-time the behavior of the drive, including disk read errors, sector remapping, temperature, etc. On my Linux system, I use it to monitor my drives, and when it indicates that a drive is starting to degrade, or fail, then I know I need to replace it. I had a failing drive this week that because the SMART interface informed me of this situation, I was able to back up the data to a new drive to replace it. It is now FUBAR, but because I saw the situation in time, I lost no data (including all of my Doctor Who collections, going back into the 1960's).

Member Avatar for bryann

Ok thanks for your help. I downloaded a program called CrystalDiskInfo which can apparently do what you said and that reported the health of my SSD as good so hopefully all is good.

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