HP-Branded Intel SSD Media Wearout Indicator

[mrgus]

I recently bought some Intel DC S3500 SSD's, which really turned out to be "HP 240GB Value End ENT VK0240GDJXU" drives (an hp-branded oem version of the Intel DC S3500). I'm using them on a Linux server and I've noticed via smartctl that the usual Intel "media wearout indicator" attribute isn't present. Usually it's attribute E9 (233) on these Intel SSDs, but seems to be absent in the HP OEM version.

Is there a way to get the media wearout indicator information on such an SSD? If not, is it safe to flash the firmware to the official Intel firmware (in the hopes that this attribute will start showing up)? I intend to put these in a RAID, and would like to be able to monitor how far through their expected lifespan these drives are.

The smartctl output I get is:

smartctl 6.3 2014-03-13 r3885M [x86_64-linux-3.2.0-60-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 1
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   130   130   039    Pre-fail  Always       -       5524
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   095   095   001    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       317
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       25
171 Program_Fail_Count      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
172 Erase_Fail_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
173 Unknown_Attribute       0x0033   100   100   001    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
174 Unsafe_Shutdown_Count   0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       21
175 Power_Loss_Cap_Test     0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       645 (2 7507)
180 Unused_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot 0x003b   130   130   039    Pre-fail  Always       -       5524
184 End-to-End_Error        0x0033   100   100   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
190 Temperature_Case        0x0022   081   080   000    Old_age   Always       -       19 (Min/Max 19/21)
194 Temperature_Internal    0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       19
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       305988
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 CRC_Error_Count         0x003e   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
226 Workld_Media_Wear_Indic 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
227 Workld_Host_Reads_Perc  0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       100
228 Workload_Minutes        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       7507

Note that 226 is not the media wearout indicator. It's the "timed workload media wear" attribute. You can basically setup a session and check the wear during a session or something to that effect, doesn't give any information on the overall state of the drive. I had edited smartctl's driverdb to get it to recognize this as an Intel S3500, but it just changed the output cosmetically (basically had the wrong names for the workload* attributes).

If anybody has any insight it would be much appreciated.

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PS- This thread has been moved from Storage>General to Disk - Forum Moderator