So I bought a ssd off of ebay. $5.40 shipped. Kingston 120gb.
I’ve yet to connect it to my pc. I’ll be first disconnecting my hard drive, and then connecting this hard drive. Unclear it’s contents. I’ll be booting off a ZorinOS livecd.
Is there any tool I can install on the livecd to check the overall health of my ssd? I know literally nothing about it’s past, and I realize theres a significant chance I just bought junk.
I’m new to linux. Like brand new. So don’t just say 'Yeah, install SSDChecker V.5.035 from the repo". Assume I’m an idiot, and have zero clue how to do the thing you’re asking. Not that I won’t do it, but maybe link to a newbie guide on how to do the thing.
Zorin is GNOME based, you should have disks app installed. Open it, find the drive and select it (whether you have sata, usb, nvme) . on the hamburger menu choose the benchmark tool, then try the SMART tool. You will get an idea of the performance and if any smart flags got triggered.
I shall try this when I get home. Is SMART something most SSDs have? I’m unclear on the concept. Basically his auction said “offers accepted” or something like that. I put an offer of $5, thinking he’s going to increase the offer, and I can get a baseline of if I want to purchase it. Surprisingly enough, when I came back and checked, it just said “Offer accepted, you’ve been automatically charged”
Alright. Cool. I guess…although gotta honest, if he was willing to accept a $5 bid, I’m not terribly optimistic about how healthy this drive is. I’ll basically be using it as “I want to try that distro for the day…ok, I don’t like that one, or maybe I do!” Then with the distros I actually like I have this whole system which is still shipping in parts. But basically the front of my PC is going to be easily swappable 2.5" SSD’s, and I can just take out the main SSD, pop in a “disposable” ssd (for lack of a better term), and try out a distro. If I really do like it, I can always buy a GOOD ssd, and have it be an alternate distro I hop between.
But I’m really expecting to get home, test ssd health, and get told “It’s trash. It’s already dead actually.”
SMART was established for HDD originally but adopted for SSD later. Some values may not be totally relevant these days…but it is the way the drive records errors, temperature, etc compared to a manufacturer determined threshold. The idea is drive would report to OS that it may be failing before a failure happens.
Hoepfully you just happened upon a seller looking to get rid of old components and not a scam.
There is a Linux app like Crystal Disk Mark, called KDiskmark that you can also run for some performance testing. Ifyou’ve connected the ssd to the data/msata interface (rather than using wxtwrnal USB2 adapter), and you get super terrible performance compared to online specs then it could be abused.
I’ve done server manufacturing in my career and generally I use only two tools to check disk health if it’s not behind another card:
smartctl - this will give you a readout of disk information, and depending on which options you use it will give you attributes that can indicate pre-failure modes and current health as well as link health in case you have a bad cable or port on your motherboard.
if you want all the information generally I would do this: smartctl -x /dev/sda (or whatever drive designation it is)
look at the attribute section and the phy health section at the bottom.
warning this can be a little complicated to interpret if you don’t already know what to look for so read the manual on Smart CTL to see the values mean.
I think zorinos is Ubuntu based, so I nabbed you a guide, I’ve never used this one but looked okay when I skimmed it: https://thelinuxcode.com/install-and-configure-smartctl-on-ubuntu/
fio - this is a multi-purpose stress utility. it’s not too complicated to set up but you do want a configuration file and you might need a little help with that or to use a copy from online.
this will run some operations on your drive and provide you a report about how well it performed.
warning, do not run long read write operations on SSD, it will eventually wear out the drive.
I would probably do a longer sequence of sequential and random reads with a couple of short runs of random read write
link to fio install instructions for Ubuntu: https://dev.fio.net/docs/install-using-packages
Just to expand on the smartctl bit: you can totally use smartctl with some RAID controllers!
See here for examples / supported cards: https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Supported_RAID-Controllers
Just checked and all presently available tools on Linux seem to be CLI bound.
Inspect the hardware physically if you can aswell
I can now, as it’s in my possesion. But when I “bought” it, I couldn’t. I made an offer on ebay of $5.00, and he took it.
So physically, besides obvious damage/cracks, what should I be looking for?
I use this hdsentinel
Oooooh, I like this. I hope I can install this when I get home. It looks exactly like what I was hypothetically imagining in my head.