Hello,

I used the Low Level Format Tool to format my three-weeks-old Kingston SSDNow 60 GB SSD. I got the 1866 of these errors:



What do these errors mean? Yes, I can read English, but what exactly has happened? What does "5" mean?

Any help is appreciated. Kingston is offering me an exchange of the drive, which is working normally apart from these errors.

You might never know. I doubt Kingston would tell you about the error codes.
Seems interesting the first one was at exactly 1 MB and the others are apart by 64k or some other multiple of kb..

Could be something like one of the NANDs being faulty and when the controller tried to access the chip it cant, but accessing other chips is ok.

I don't know, but I would take the replacement.

Out of curiosity, Why did you want to LLF such a new drive?

cheaper NANDs used but will work fine to some point
i think it remapped the faulty nands

Thank you for the comments. Why the LLF?

Well, I asked Kingston support about two problems visible in the SMART data (see below) and they told me to use a third party tool to do a LLF. Since I needed to restore the system to the drive anyway, I did the LLF before copying a new image onto the drive.

Here are the two problems:

13: (SSD Soft Read Error Rate) Normalized Error Rate 45 Sectors Read 2720782 Soft Read Error Count 238405

This shows an EEC-corrected bit error rate (BER) of 10^(-4.5). This is how the normalised value is calculated: 10 * LOG (base 10) of the (1 / BER). I have no idea what the normalised value should be, I read for TLC NAND 10-^4 is normal, but for MLC, as used in this drive, the BER should be much lower. So I'm not really impressed by the value.

174: (SSD Unexpected power loss count) Unexpected power loss Count 29

No idea why I get these. Sometimes the count is one higher in the morning than what it was before proper shutdown at night. Once it even rose by one after a hibernate. I guess the board is turning off the power a fraction too early.

The Kingston support is pretty hopeless, first the offered the replacement, then I sent in some more SMART data and a CHKDSK report (as if that would tell me anything about the state of the SSD) and they withdrew their offer. The SMART data says:

5: (SSD Retired Block Count) Spare blocks remaining 100% Retired Block 0
170: (SSD Number of Remaining Spares) Number of remaining spares 1760

So I am really wondering how bad the drive is. How can I check for faulty remapped NANDs?

hello there was a program called NANDway for the ps3
but other then that no other programs that will remapping the bad NANDs

i think atola is bring out a sdd add on for there machine
which would wipe the drive clean and i think remap the bad areas.

i would try and fill the drive up and if there any issues its going to show

it should automatic remap the bad sectors

i would stick with a better drive then kingston

samsung are good

I only needed a 60 GB drive. Samsung don't make those. Kingston is meant to be better than Sandisk.

"Better" is very subjective. I have seen some questionable practices with Kingston, and indeed they do not make their own chips. Sandisk do, but tend to go off on their own wagon sometimes.

It all depends on many factors.

You could have the very best, but still be unlucky for a failure.

IMHO end users do not have enough solid information to be able to call any brand better. It is all Hearsay.

If Kingston wont issue you another disk based on the reports, how about using the drive a lot in a short while and once the report shows the same kind of things as last one, contact them again.

I am wondering how valid the advice to do a low level format was.