Ed Light wrote:

HD Sentinel's SSD health rating is misguided. He uses the life remaining
SMART number. So as soon as the life remaining in the SSD is 99%, it
gets derated.

To keep the tray icon from going yellow, when the SSD is selected and
the Overview tab is showing, you can double-click on the Health graph; I
set it to 30/15, so it will get yellow when there's 30% lifespan left.,
red at 15%.

For me, HD Sentinel says SMART is declaring 98% health (how much
estimated life remains). The tray icon is not yellow. It's green.

When I hover the mouse pointer over the health bar for the SSD (in the
main GUI), the popup help says the thresholds are

Yellow: 50%
Red: 25%

Those must be the defaults because I've never changed them. In fact, I
didn't know they could be changed. Since HD Sentinel is estimating 98%
health for my SSD, the tray icon isn't yellow. It won't turn yellow
until HD Sentinel estimates 50% health.

I did not find a "Life remaining" titled SMART attribute. The only one
that had a matching value of 98 (as shown for the HD Sentinel health
bar's value) was the "Wear levelling count" (177) attribute; however,
98% in the bar graph is likely a composite value using multiple SMART
attributes.

From http://www.cropel.com/library/smart-attribute-list.aspx, there are
several "life" attributes but several do not apply to SSDs. I suspect
your "life remaining" attribute is Media Wearout Indicator (233). My
SSD (Samsung 850 EVO 250GB) is not returning that attribute for
visibility to HD Sentinel. HD Sentinel cannot be using a "misleading"
remaining life attribute to estimate remaining life of the SSD in my
setup since the SSD is not reporting that attribute. It must be using
the other attributes that the SSD does report.

There are green checkmarks next to each SMART attribute that HD Sentinel
does use in gauging remaining life. For my SSD, the green-checked
attributes a

Reallocated Sectors Count (5)
Wear Levelling Count (177)
Used Reserved Block Count (179)
Runtime Bad Block (183)
Uncorrectable Error Count (187)

It is not using some "misleading" guesstimate defined in the firmware on
the drive by the manufacturer.

https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/56_attrib.html

I don't see "Media Wearout Indicator" (233) listed as an attribute that
HD Sentinel cares about.

https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/52_cond.html

Under Advanced config options, the health calcuation algorithm currently
selected in my setup is "Analyse data field (default)". I did NOT elect
the "Analyse vendor-specific values".

NOTE: I'm using the 5.01 payware version of HD Sentinel. Maybe the
options and algorithms are different (lesser) in the trial version or
DOS/Linux freeware versions.

"He uses the life remaining SMART number." Not in my setup. That SMART
attribute (233) isn't available from my SSD.