Norm Why wrote:
A 'lot of diffuse hardware problems' is a story too long to recite. I was
reluctant to upgrade to a BETA BIOS. When I did I thought I'd bricked the
machine. After a nights sleep, I realized the upgrade had reset to
defaults / PCI monitor rather than PCIe. Now hardware works perfect.
However, 500GB Seagate Barracuda says it has 30% life left. The red light
that indicates drive activity glowed too often.
The SMART table here can allow looking at individual parameters.

http://hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

That means the raw data field in the "Reallocated"
has gone non-zero. At a guess.

Paul

Thanks Paul,

Using that tool, '(05) Reallocated Sector Count' was displayed for the 500GB
Samsung EVO SSD, but not for the 500 GB Seagate Barracuda SSD. It's
connected to a different controller, a PCIe (x1) SATAIII card.

Sorry, I thought that 500GB Seagate Barracuda was a HDD.

The HDTune tool is too old to display SSD tables properly.

You were probably using some Toolkit to get that number,
and maybe the Toolkit has the SMART table in it somewhere.

My SSD samples here, tend to have rounded numbers,
like 256GB or 512GB, rather than 250 and 500 values.

The red glow, means SATA commands are coming in. The drive
can still be writing, as it rearranges the data, but the
LED does not light while this is happening. Any LED glows,
indicate your OS is doing something. You would need to
probe further, to figure out whether the operations are
read or write. (Task Manager has I/O columns you can turn
on for this.)

The SSD has a processor inside, and it is running for as
long as the drive has power.

Paul