I am currently in an RV, returning home after viewing the solar eclipse in Little Rock, Arkansas. It's a 2-month trip overall. I rely on my laptop for managing digital photos, but neglected to bring my copy of SpinRite with me. Of course, my Windows laptop "died" about 10 days ago - it would not boot at all. Windows Chkdsk got it running again, but it was horribly slow and virtually unusable. Then I listened to Steve's recent Security Now description of his woes with an SSD on Laurie's machine, and I realized I was experiencing the same problem. So I dug through some old emails (vintage 2008!) to find my SpinRite product key, purchased a new USB thumb drive (forgot to bring a spare!), downloaded and installed SpinRite, and set it working last night. This morning, SR reported that it had processed Level 3 on both SSDs. I rebooted the machine, ran the Disk Maintenance as recommended by SR, and the computer seems back to its old self. That's the first time in the 16 years since I purchased SR that it's come through for me. Thank you for a great product, Steve.
BTW - the detailed statistics at the end of the run showed that the primary SSD took 5:40 h to run, while the secondary SSD required 2:14. Both are nominally 1 TB. The primary SSD reported that it had 69,136 "Total writes" and 64 "Realloc space". The secondary SSD reported zeros for both of these statistics. Neither disk reported any errors. Am I correct in assuming those stats are symptomatic of the "weak or slow read" problem that Steve described on Security Now?
BTW - the detailed statistics at the end of the run showed that the primary SSD took 5:40 h to run, while the secondary SSD required 2:14. Both are nominally 1 TB. The primary SSD reported that it had 69,136 "Total writes" and 64 "Realloc space". The secondary SSD reported zeros for both of these statistics. Neither disk reported any errors. Am I correct in assuming those stats are symptomatic of the "weak or slow read" problem that Steve described on Security Now?
Calling the "raw" SMART data that various SSDs choose to publish “unreliable” would be kind. You can see this in the fact that your two SSDs are showing very different data for those two metrics. There is other information that SSDs tend to publish that's more useful, things like total reads and total writes over the life time of the device. But these can also be SSD-specific (like that "Total Writes" reading.)