Question Is it a good or bad idea to test any new SSD I buy?

[Cyber_Akuma]

Just bought a new NVME, is it a good idea to run hw2testw on it to make sure there is nothing wrong with it, or would that be reducing it's lifespan considerably for no reason if I did so? The NVME is name-brand and was purchased from Microcenter so the chances of it being fake are nearly zero, but I am more worried about any potential defects.

 

[USAFRet]

Just bought a new NVME, is it a good idea to run hw2testw on it to make sure there is nothing wrong with it, or would that be reducing it's lifespan considerably for no reason if I did so? The NVME is name-brand and was purchased from Microcenter so the chances of it being fake are nearly zero, but I am more worried about any potential defects.

Running a single test is likely to reduce the drive lifespan by a few hours. In the context of 10 years.

It is also probably not needed.

 

[Lafong]

I'm not sure what hw2testw is, but I wouldn't have an qualms about running it if it is a legit test.

I pounded my Intel NVMe with 3 terabytes of writes the day it arrived. Intentionally, using an Intel-supplied tool. Took about 6 hours.

It was useful if for no other reason than that I learned what max temperatures might be.

But generally, testing like that would be optional.....but not for reasons of lifespan.

 

[Cyber_Akuma]

I'm not sure what hw2testw is, but I wouldn't have an qualms about running it if it is a legit test.

Somewhat old now but was popular for testing SDcards back in the day. Basically it just writes an X amount of data to a drive (you can basically make it just fill the entire free space of the drive too if you want) and then tries to read that data back to make sure all the range you selected can be written to and successfully read back. Useful for detecting if a SD card or SSD is lying about it's capacity, but it can also see if it's just not writing/reading data back properly.

 

[Ralston18]

Testing.

Not a bad idea per se.

However,I will submit the suggestion that backing up any drive of any sort is likely to be more "beneficial" in the long run.

 

[Misgar]

I "borked" a 128GB Integral Compact Flash card bought from a reputable supplier with h2testw. Never happened before with any other SD or CF cards, so I put it down to bad luck or the card might not have liked being completely filled in one session. The 128GB Integral card was half the price of an equivalent Sandisk Extreme Pro CF card. I swapped it for a pair of 64GB Sandisk CF cards and paid double the price as a result.

I prefer to use the Read Test (under Surface Test) in Hard Disk Sentinel Pro to check new hard drives. This takes 11 hours on a 6TB hard disk. If the Read Test shows sectors which are more difficult to read and require multiple retries, I run a Write + Read test which takes twice as long.

I don't test SSDs with h2testw unless I've bought them from a suspect source. I did use h2testw to test a 1TB 980 Pro NVMe drive and two 500GB SATA SSDs which I bought from a local computer shop when I was abroad, just to make sure they looked legit.