What SMART value tracks SSD write wear?

• A. TBW, Wear_Leveling_Count, Media_Wearout_Indicator
• B. Power_On_Hours
• C. Temperature
• D. Spin_Retry_Count

Answer: (A)

Understanding SSD wear through SMART data means focusing on metrics that quantify how much data has been written and how that wear is managed across the flash.

TBW, or Total Bytes Written, is the direct measure of how much data has been written to the SSD. It serves as an endurance indicator: more data written generally means more wear, so TBW helps gauge how close the drive might be to its write endurance limit.

Wear_Leveling_Count tells you how evenly wear is distributed across the flash blocks. Since flash cells wear out withwrites, good wear leveling spreads writes to prevent premature failure of a small subset of cells. This attribute gives insight into how effectively the drive is managing wear.

Media_Wearout_Indicator is a vendor-specific metric that signals overall wear and remaining life, often expressed as a percentage or life estimate. It provides a higher-level view of how much life the drive has left based on wear patterns.

The other options don’t measure wear from writes: Power_On_Hours tracks how long the drive has been powered on, Temperature reflects thermal conditions, and Spin_Retry_Count is related to spinning drives’ retry behavior rather than wear of NAND cells.

So, the combination of TBW, Wear_Leveling_Count, and Media_Wearout_Indicator best captures SSD write wear.