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.

  • @OmnislashIsACloudAppEnglish
    9•2 days ago

    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