PNY's tech support

Nebulous

Nebulous

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 16, 2005
Messages
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I'm having a "discussion" with PNY's tech support named "Bruce" about my NVME drive.

In less than 90 days of having it, the health percentage dropped a point and it has over 3.0TB of writes :eek: I don't have anything on the drive aside from the OS. All my proggies, games, music & movies are on separate platter drives. I don't understand how in less than 3 months I've written 3tb of crap on it, not to mention it's already degrading o_O

Here's the convo:

Me:
Hello Bruce,

I'm a little confused about the health level of my PNY NVMe drive. Not 90 days (3months) and already the drive's health level drop a percentile. Now I'm aware of reads & writes take a toll on a mechanical drive/platter drive, but it hasn't been a year and already the NVMe drive is showing signs of degradation so soon. Not only my drive but my colleague's drive as well. Do these drives have a short lifespan? Should we be concerned and start looking for replacement drives?

Attached is a screenshot of HD Sentinel from my drive;

Thank you


Bruce's reply:
You have written 2.77TB to a 240GB hard drive in only 62 days. Yes, I would say which that extreme write through in such a short period of time that you will slowly continue to see drive degradation.

Bruce

Technical Support


Me:
Hi Bruce,

That's extremely odd as all I have on this drive is windows 10 and nothing else. All my programs are on separate Western Digital NAS drives. Not only does it run extremely hot past it's rated safe operating temperatures, but it's degrading an alarming quick rate. I will presume that this drive will fail in less than a year and now I have to purchase a replacement NVMe drive asap which I am not happy about. I will not purchase another PNY product again and will notify my colleagues to avoid.

Thank you for your time.

Bruce's reply:
Your own SSD report does not lie. 2.77TB has been written to this drive in a little over two months and I would imagine constant writes like this are going to make the device pretty hot. That type of write through does not happen to an average user using it for an operating system for years. I would suggest investigating why your system is writing so much to the drive in such a short time period. If you do this to *any* drive you are certainly going to have problems, PNY brand or not.

Bruce

Technical Support


Me:
I'm sorry Bruce, but that is unacceptable. My friend's drive which is the other drive purchased by me at the same time, is even worse. In 48 days it's already 6.08TB written which is not normal. His drive already lost a percentile in 31 days of usage with a new OS install and nothing else. He also surfs the forums & emails. Coincidence?

When I installed the drive with nothing on it, temps were already hitting the 70c mark and I didn't install the OS on it yet. My friend's drive was even worse temp wise. I find it odd that my friend's drive, which is identical and purchased at the same time, yet installed 30 days later, has more writes than mine.

Unsure if this is a fluke, but in all my years of building, benching, voltmoddings, watercooling and gaming computers I have never seen anything like this. That one particular drive will write almost 3TB of data while I'm on forums or checking my emails is ridiculous.

I'm just stating that this is not normal behavior and there is nothing in the backgound of my pc that is writing 3TB in less than 90 days, nor can I find anything doing it. It is my responsibility to voice my dismay and concern about your product.

My 2.5 SSD's (LiteOn, Sandisk Ultra) don't have this much writes on them when I was using them as my OS drives for over 2 years which the NVMe drive has replaced.


Thanks again for your time.

What kind of BS is this guy trying to spoonfeed me? :rolleyes:
 
Well.. He's not wrong and windows 10 likes to do crap in the background we have to dig to find and also notable browsers such as chrome and Firefox like to constantly write session data if left running. Procmon and performance monitor logging of disk activity (and the parse with PAL) could be useful in finding and minimizing or eliminating activity.

Edit- another possibility is that the writes are being misinterpreted as its not until NVME v1.3 that we will see better standardization of drive attributes IIRC. The heat could be normal but then maybe its doing TRIM stuff too often. Might you be able to dual boot with windows 7 or a linux distro for a week to double check?

Edit- one last thought, lets say something is consistently causing what's called write amplification aside from the software, there are tools for calculating this but I haven't used them; if you can track this trend on yours and your friends drive you can present this scientific data and it may lead to new firmware.
 
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The info from Bruce/PNY seems okay to me. He is giving you reasonable conclusions based on the available information.

Try running Resource Monitor on the machines. The Disk tab should show you disk activity, including the program, file, and bytes information. It might reveal your cause.
 
Windows constantly does things in the background, from using your pagefile to caching just about anything it likes. On top of that even if your apps are on another drive, Windows will still store application data for pretty near all of them on the OS drive. Am I surprised to see the health drop, even a small amount? Sure, but I am not surprised to see the 3TB.
 
I like his reply back:

We do not even know if the program that you are using is accurate and we do not support or recommend any type of software that checks drive data such as this. If it is accurate however, it looks normal. You are using the drive. You will see degradation over time.


Even at 1% degradation after two+ months you would still have YEARS before the drive would have reached 0%. That is more or less the life expectancy of any flash based drive.


Again, we do not know if your hard drive program is accurately reading the smart data at all. It may not be. But if it is you may want to look into whatever may be running on your (and your friends) system that can be causing so much writing.


So none of the proggies I have to monitor drive health/power cycles/ drive errors/ Life remaining is accurate and unsupported and NOT recommended :rolleyes:

This guy is a serious moron. Time for me to just get a new drive and toss this pos in my box-o-junk.
 
Nebulous said:
I like his reply back:

We do not even know if the program that you are using is accurate and we do not support or recommend any type of software that checks drive data such as this. If it is accurate however, it looks normal. You are using the drive. You will see degradation over time.


Even at 1% degradation after two+ months you would still have YEARS before the drive would have reached 0%. That is more or less the life expectancy of any flash based drive.


Again, we do not know if your hard drive program is accurately reading the smart data at all. It may not be. But if it is you may want to look into whatever may be running on your (and your friends) system that can be causing so much writing.


So none of the proggies I have to monitor drive health/power cycles/ drive errors/ Life remaining is accurate and unsupported and NOT recommended :rolleyes:

This guy is a serious moron. Time for me to just get a new drive and toss this pos in my box-o-junk.
Click to expand...

Why make this post at all? Everyone here agreed with the PNY support. So because of that the guy is a "serious moron"? You came here to get us to rabble rabble and it didn't work, sorry you were wrong. Good Lord.
 
It's obvious PNY is purposely bricking drives so you buy more.
 
How long do you expect a drive to take before it drops a percent in health? A year? That would be it's expected to last 100 years. Drives degrade with use. It's normal.
 
auntjemima said:
Why make this post at all? Everyone here agreed with the PNY support. So because of that the guy is a "serious moron"? You came here to get us to rabble rabble and it didn't work, sorry you were wrong. Good Lord.
Click to expand...

The point being the drive already started to degrade in less than 90 days. 62 days and already it started. Sure I know drives degrade over time/heavy use/file transfers, it's the nature of the beast. It's bound to happen and it does, but starting that shit in 62 days with nothing but windows on it is pure bull crap. Yeah I'm peed the fuck off. I wasn't expecting the drive to start losing health for at least a year minimum, not fucking 60 days.
 
Nebulous said:
The point being the drive already started to degrade in less than 90 days. 62 days and already it started. Sure I know drives degrade over time/heavy use/file transfers, it's the nature of the beast. It's bound to happen and it does, but starting that shit in 62 days with nothing but windows on it is pure bull crap. Yeah I'm peed the fuck off. I wasn't expecting the drive to start losing health for at least a year minimum, not fucking 60 days.
Click to expand...

What was you expectation here? You wanted the drive to sit at 100% forever? You don't like the number going down slowly over time to (possibly) accurately predict remaining drive live?
 
My SSD shows 28.6TB total host writes in 735 days.
Basically 3.6TB every 3 months.
Health is at 91%
I have my OS and Programs and some games on it.
 
Ocellaris said:
What was you expectation here? You wanted the drive to sit at 100% forever? You don't like the number going down slowly over time to (possibly) accurately predict remaining drive live?
Click to expand...

No not forever, but not to start so early in it's life span. Aside from the CS rep telling me I shouldn't be using proggies that show it's remaining life/health. Funny that my 2.5 SSD's I've had for a few years still show 100% life left. Odd indeed.
 
Nebulous said:
No not forever, but not to start so early in it's life span. Aside from the CS rep telling me I shouldn't be using proggies that show it's remaining life/health. Funny that my 2.5 SSD's I've had for a few years still show 100% life left. Odd indeed.
Click to expand...

If you have been using them regularly for years and they aren't showing a decrease in life leads me to believe those drives are not correctly reporting their status. Maybe they are skewing your expectations. 5% a year means that SSD will last you 20 years under heavy use.. that's pretty fucking crazy for an SSD. You should be sending that guy a thank you for creating a quality drive.
 
Wow, good idea about the health numbers on other SSDs. Maybe they have been skewed to stay high. Nobody would complain about that.

For OP, in Device Manager, Disk Drives, does your drive have Write caching enabled on the Policies tab for the drive?
 
safelyRemove said:
Wow, good idea about the health numbers on other SSDs. Maybe they have been skewed to stay high. Nobody would complain about that.

For OP, in Device Manager, Disk Drives, does your drive have Write caching enabled on the Policies tab for the drive?
Click to expand...


Write caching is enabled (Checked) which is winblow's default setting.


auntjemima said:
If you have been using them regularly for years and they aren't showing a decrease in life leads me to believe those drives are not correctly reporting their status. Maybe they are skewing your expectations. 5% a year means that SSD will last you 20 years under heavy use.. that's pretty fucking crazy for an SSD. You should be sending that guy a thank you for creating a quality drive.
Click to expand...

Wow, I never thought of it that way. Thx for pointing that out.
 
Whether hard wear or not...you'll be replacing it in 18 months probably anyway...;)
 
Nebulous said:
No not forever, but not to start so early in it's life span. Aside from the CS rep telling me I shouldn't be using proggies that show it's remaining life/health. Funny that my 2.5 SSD's I've had for a few years still show 100% life left. Odd indeed.
Click to expand...

If you have had a drive for “years” and it is still reporting 100% health, that just means it isn’t reporting anything useful. The drives won’t last forever, a drive stuck at 100% for years isn’t a sign of infinite life. At some point the drive will die, and you will be like “That’s weird it still had 100% life left!”
 
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Nebulous said:
Yeah, I know. But still I was trying to get a year out of it before it starts shitting the bed so soon :unsure:
Click to expand...

Being below 100% doesn’t mean the drive is shitting the bed. It’s likely just knocking off 1% per X TB written.
 
auntjemima said:
If you have been using them regularly for years and they aren't showing a decrease in life leads me to believe those drives are not correctly reporting their status. Maybe they are skewing your expectations. 5% a year means that SSD will last you 20 years under heavy use.. that's pretty fucking crazy for an SSD. You should be sending that guy a thank you for creating a quality drive.
Click to expand...

Mine has a 20 year life expectancy, lol
crucial-128-256-ssd-life.jpg

not sure what is up with that though, some glitch I assume, since it varies from 6 to 20 years on that drive, lol.
 
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