What could cause this extremely high wear leveling? (Crucial M4)

T

Tabs

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 24, 2005
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147
I have two identical 256GB Crucial M4 drives that are about 3.5 years old. The OS one started throwing SMART errors last week indicating that the drive's life is nearing its end:

crystal_C.jpg


The identical other drive (I have my games on it) shows almost no wear at all:

crystal_D.jpg


The Average Block-Erase Count parameter is going up at a crazy rate - here's the drive today a week later:

crystal_C_222.jpg


If I'm understanding this correctly, something is causing the drive to completely write/erase its blocks internally like 6 or 7 times a day. I have barely touched the computer during that time - it does run 24/7, but it's been idle at the desktop essentially that whole time. (I use my laptop for most general task stuff while sitting around the house) The only things I have running all the time that even make any sense at all to me for potentially being involved in this are Bitdefender AV 2016 and Backblaze cloud backup. System is running Win10 Pro.

Any other ideas here? I know I'm gonna have to replace the drive, but I'm worried that whatever's going on is just going to wear down the new one really fast as well.
 
Last edited:
BACKUP THAT DRIVE FIRST.

Use a Crucial utility to double check on what CDI is telling you (though SMART doesn't lke). See if that will show you the total writes (TBW) and post that number. If it matchsz up to the P/E cycles you're seeing, it shouldn't be difficult to find the culprit process(es).
 
izx said:
BACKUP THAT DRIVE FIRST.

Use a Crucial utility to double check on what CDI is telling you (though SMART doesn't lke). See if that will show you the total writes (TBW) and post that number. If it matchsz up to the P/E cycles you're seeing, it shouldn't be difficult to find the culprit process(es).
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've got backups - not worried about that. Just need to know what's doing this to the drive.

Here's what the Crucial utility shows:

crucial-1.jpg


crucial-2.jpg
 
capt_cope said:
Just a thought, have you tweaked the pagefile settings in windows?
Click to expand...

Good catch. How much RAM are you running?

The M4 is rated for 72 TBW/3000 P/E cycles, but experimentally they continued to last until at least ~12000 P/E cycles.

There's also the high number of unaligned accesses, which can cause a little extra P/E wear and tear.

From an elevated command prompt, run and paste the results of:

Code: 
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:

and

wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index
 
Update:

I think it may be Bitdefender doing it. I uninstalled that this morning and went back to just Windows Defender+MBAM. Still sitting at 2735 now at midnight. Should have gone up more by now. Fingers crossed that this is it.

=========

Pagefile - set to auto manage. I have 8GB of RAM on the system.

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:
Code: 
NTFS Volume Serial Number :        redacted
NTFS Version   :                   3.1
LFS Version    :                   2.0
Number Sectors :                   0x000000001dbdf2af
Total Clusters :                   0x0000000003b7be55
Free Clusters  :                   0x0000000001acebde
Total Reserved :                   0x0000000000001020
Bytes Per Sector  :                512
Bytes Per Physical Sector :        512
Bytes Per Cluster :                4096
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment    :  1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment :  0
Mft Valid Data Length :            0x000000001cbc0000
Mft Start Lcn  :                   0x00000000000c0000
Mft2 Start Lcn :                   0x0000000000000002
Mft Zone Start :                   0x0000000002ddab80
Mft Zone End   :                   0x0000000002de73a0
Max Device Trim Extent Count :     512
Max Device Trim Byte Count :       0xffffffff
Max Volume Trim Extent Count :     62
Max Volume Trim Byte Count :       0x40000000
Resource Manager Identifier :      redacted

wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name, Index
Code: 
BlockSize  Index  Name                   StartingOffset
512        0      Disk #1, Partition #0  1048576
512        0      Disk #0, Partition #0  1048576
512        1      Disk #0, Partition #1  105906176
512        2      Disk #0, Partition #2  255588302848
512        0      Disk #3, Partition #0  1048576
512        0      Disk #2, Partition #0  135266304

Thanks again for the help guys, really appreciate it.
 
Yeah, you're good -- those numbers are perfect: 4k cluster size, partitions aligned at 4k boundaries.

Why would BitDefender be writing so much?

Anyway, if you are just out of the 3-year warranty (3.5 years, you said?), contact Crucial and tell them that their drive is worn out after only 25TB when it's rated for 72 TB. You're very disappointed, big Crucial fan, always used Crucial RAM/SSDs, now you won't, etc. etc. ;) They might just make an exception and RMA the drive under warranty.
 
Both my my M4 drives have high unaligned accesses and I read that that isn't something to worry about.

crucial-m4-256GB-disk-info.jpg


crucial-m4-256-smart.jpg
 
izx said:
Yeah, you're good -- those numbers are perfect: 4k cluster size, partitions aligned at 4k boundaries.

Why would BitDefender be writing so much?

Anyway, if you are just out of the 3-year warranty (3.5 years, you said?), contact Crucial and tell them that their drive is worn out after only 25TB when it's rated for 72 TB. You're very disappointed, big Crucial fan, always used Crucial RAM/SSDs, now you won't, etc. etc. ;) They might just make an exception and RMA the drive under warranty.
Click to expand...

Yeah I have no idea on Bitdender but I did find some forum posts about past versions writing tons of data to the temp folder, like 400,000+ files at a time and stuff like that. I was running the 2016 version but who knows I guess. That erase count hasn't gone up in close to 24 hours now after going up 6 or 7 per day though - I'll wait a few more days to be sure, but I have to think that was probably it.

On the RMA possibility, I'm about to upgrade my system anyway - probably gonna go with something newer/faster like the 950 Pro m.2 stuff, so it's not a huge deal but maybe I'll try that anyway, thanks. Figuring out what the hell did it was the bigger concern so that it doesn't happen again.
 
Tabs said:
...on Bitdender but I did find some forum posts about past versions writing tons of data to the temp folder, like 400,000+ files at a time and stuff like that.
Click to expand...

Yeah, hundreds of thousands of small files would explain why the drive came so close to it's P/E cycle limit while being well below the TBW limit.
 
Still sitting good at 2735 after nearly 2 days without Bitdefender - I think that was definitely it. Ridiculously bad bug in the software...
 
Tabs said:
Still sitting good at 2735 after nearly 2 days without Bitdefender - I think that was definitely it. Ridiculously bad bug in the software...
Click to expand...

Not fixed in 2014 ... still not fixed in 2016.

For a standalone AV, I highly recommend Eset's NOD32 Antivirus (NOT the "Smart Security"). Goes on sale at Newegg several times a year for ~$15. Non-intrusive, fast and fairly light on the system.
 
McAfee has been on sale too. Tried it because of reviews.
newegg and amazon. Tried it for "unlimited PCs." Security can be over active, doesn't work on my Kindles. 4 computers, 1 laptop, 1 tablet, one price.
 
izx said:
Not fixed in 2014 ... still not fixed in 2016.

For a standalone AV, I highly recommend Eset's NOD32 Antivirus (NOT the "Smart Security"). Goes on sale at Newegg several times a year for ~$15. Non-intrusive, fast and fairly light on the system.
Click to expand...

Is that $15 for a life time subscription?
 
One more quick update - been a week now and still steady at 2735. Case closed - I'm going to contact Bitdefender about this as well, they need to be aware that their software is actually damaging drives.
 
Tabs said:
One more quick update - been a week now and still steady at 2735. Case closed - I'm going to contact Bitdefender about this as well, they need to be aware that their software is actually damaging drives.
Click to expand...

Yay! :) Hopefully they do something about it. A poor review on Newegg or contacting them via Twitter may get their attention better than one-on-one contact.

Private_Ops said:
Is that $15 for a life time subscription?
Click to expand...

No, per year. However, renewal licenses go on sale for $5 once or twice a year at Newegg -- I stocked up on three of those and each year it's simply a case of entering the code and "renewing". How their updates work is that they give you a unique username and password for the update servers. Expires in one year, renew, new user/pass, rinse and repeat.
 
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