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Using SMART Command to Monitor Life of SSD or Flash Card

Posted by John Kuracek on Thursday, 13 Feb 2014

SMART Command Information

Predicting usable life of an SSD or Flash card is more of an art than a science. Not only is it dependent on the Flash components used and Firmware algorithm, but also on the device usage model which in most situations is inherently impossible to predict.

However, monitoring the SSD usage for Flash media end of life is quite customary. A standard way of monitoring the media is through the use of SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) Command. The SMART command is an open standard, as defined by the work group at T13.org, allowing an individual disk drive in the ATA/IDE or SCSI interface to automatically monitor its own health and report potential problems to the host in order to anticipate drive failures and prevent data loss. The SMART information is collected during the drive operation and helps host to predict the likelihood of drive failure due to critical use conditions.

The information provided by the SMART command is Vendor Specific. For Fortasa Solid State Storage products, SMART provides information about Power Cycle count, Bad Block count, Maximum and Average Erase count, and Total Available Memory Sectors. Based on this Information a computing system can assess the Flash media usage and issue an expected stop command for SSD replacement. By using SMART command system can self monitor and prevent unpredictable drive failures.

Please contact Fortasa to for more information about SMART Command implementation.