SSD: Reallocated sector count

[Mr Smiley]

I got one of the $99 Microcenter-branded 64GB SSDs as a Christmas present. When I installed the drive and booted up my Linux box, I was greeted to find that Gnome Disk Utility reported that the "disk has many bad sectors" and that the drive is failing. It appears that the reallocated sector count value is at a astonishing 1536 sectors.

Do you think this is an acceptable amount for a brand new SSD? Can anyone with an SSD tell me their reallocated sector count S.M.A.R.T. value?

 

[Tsavo]

0 on my new Intel 120GB SSD.

 

[postmortemIA]

all i can say is that lots of software has problems properly reading SMART data. Use some other tool, and I bet results will be completely different.

 

[Mark R]

It's used about 18% of the drive's 'replacement' sector capacity. This was almost certainly the result of a defective column on a flash chip, which may be within manufacturing tolerances for they brand of flash used. As a result, there will be lots of 'reallocated sectors' when the drive is manufacturered, but when the manufacturer ships the drive they zero out the 'reallocated sector count'.

What's interesting is that it's quite common for SSDs to 'develop' reallocated sectors in teh first few hours or days of use. These are almost certainly manufacturing flaws in the flash, that weren't noticed by the manufacturer during testing. But the more thorough usage once the drive is installed in a PC makes them show up and the drive will then reallocate the sectors. As this is almost certainly a manufacturing flaw in that one specific column, once all the sectors in that column get reallocated out, there shouldn't be any more trouble.

The problem is that SMART software doesn't correctly interpret the importance (or not) of reallocated sectors. A 'round number' of reallocated sectors on a nearly new SSD isn't worrying for impending failure (it's an expected manufacturing flaw, which the manufacturer didn't spot and work around at the factory - instead the drive spotted the flaw while it was in your PC and has worked around it at home)

 

[(sic)Klown12]

I believe that drive is Sandforce based(not 100% sure), and the SMART readings on them aren't the same as a HDD and programs don't always take that into account. I don't have Linux installed at the moment so I can't compare my Vertex 2 to your drive though.

 

[Mr Smiley]

I appreciate the information but I would not say that the SMART data of SSDs is necessarily incorrect or unimportant. Although, it does have a different meaning when compared with traditional HDDs.

I understand that the new Sandforce drives can map out bad blocks found during operation but there is a limit to the number of blocks that can be reallocated. I was trying to understand if the number of initial bad blocks of my brand new SSD is acceptable. It seems that my drive has reallocated many many more blocks than the numbers I have been able to find on the internet. Whether this is still within acceptable manufacturing levels, I still haven't found an answer.