A Year With NVMe RAID 0 in a Real World Setup

Drive Details & Health Report

Now that we have tested the setup and had a view of its performance, it is time to take a look at the drive’s health state. As previously mentioned and as you can see below, we can’t read out our SMART details as long as we have the RAID array created – so I’ll have to destroy it and we can have a look at the individual drives.

CrystalDiskInfo is a great and free application to read out the SMART details, so why use anything else. Below you can see the screenshots of the two individual drives and their usage details. After a year of usage, both drives retain a 100% health state and that’s no surprise when we look at the raw figures.

We get to a combined value of 10,436 GB total host reads and 7,874 GB total host writes. That is not a lot at all, all things considered. The system has been powered on with this setup for 4675 hours which roughly equals to 195 days with two power-on cycles per day.

This is quite interesting information as it gives us a view on how much we actually read and write onto a drive within a years time. We often see the total bytes written (TBW) ratings on solid state drives and now you also have something compare them to.

With 7,874 GB data written during a 365-days period, we get down to about 21.6 GB a day. When we compare that to hundreds of terabyte TBW ratings, then we see that modern solid state drives will live a long time. Out of these 365 days, the system has been running for roughly 195 days continuously when we calculate the power-on hours.