How do I stress test an SSD?

I

ih8spam

Weaksauce
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May 6, 2007
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My 5 year old SSD drive started to fail yesterday. I started to see random I/O errors crop up when doing intense writes to the drive. The SSD lifetime was reported to be around 99%, so I wasn't expecting it to fail for quite a few years.

In order to isolate the failure, I tried running some benchmarking tools to see if I could get the tools to trip up the bad SSD. The SSD's SMART information showed no issues.

However, the drive passed every benchmarking test. I tried running ATTO 4.0.x continuously for 30 minutes, and turned on data verification. The SSD passed all the tests.

Are there any tools out there that can stress test an SSD to bring out latent failures? I would like to run something periodically on my SSDs so that I don't get surprised by a sudden terminal drive failure (like the old HDDs)

Thanks!
 
If it's a SATA SSD then try a new SATA cable and a different SATA port on your motherboard. If M.2, try another slot if you have one. Benchmarking the drive would be the most stressful thing you can do to it. You can also try swapping the drive into another PC to see if the problem follows it. Installing a different SSD using the same connection you are now and check if the problem happens again.

Those are the troubleshooting steps I would take.
 
I haven't looked recently, but IOmeter was the best thing for testing this.
 
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I'll second the suggestion to try a new data cable, different SATA port, etc. You might also consider whether your power supply might be sagging a bit under heavy load. It's certainly possible for an SSD to throw write errors. However, in my experience, when an SSD fails it generally just goes dark rather than gradually failing.
 
ih8spam said:
My 5 year old SSD drive started to fail yesterday. I started to see random I/O errors crop up when doing intense writes to the drive. The SSD lifetime was reported to be around 99%, so I wasn't expecting it to fail for quite a few years.

In order to isolate the failure, I tried running some benchmarking tools to see if I could get the tools to trip up the bad SSD. The SSD's SMART information showed no issues.

However, the drive passed every benchmarking test. I tried running ATTO 4.0.x continuously for 30 minutes, and turned on data verification. The SSD passed all the tests.

Are there any tools out there that can stress test an SSD to bring out latent failures? I would like to run something periodically on my SSDs so that I don't get surprised by a sudden terminal drive failure (like the old HDDs)

Thanks!
Click to expand...
Try testing your RAM
 
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