NVMe Health Interpreter

Interpret an NVMe health log, and know which numbers actually matter.

What you paste

Parsed in your browser — never uploaded

NVMe SMART output from smartctl, nvme-cli or a vendor tool

How this reads your output

The NVMe health log is a fixed set of fields, and this pulls out the ones that mean something along with the context that makes them readable. Data units are converted to terabytes, since a data unit is a thousand 512-byte sectors and the raw figure is meaningless on its own. Power-on hours are turned into an average write rate, which is what tells you whether the endurance rating is decades away or approaching.

What the results mean

Percentage Used: Endurance consumed against the manufacturer write rating, not remaining life. A drive at 100% has reached its warranted budget and typically keeps working well past it.
Available Spare: Replacement blocks remaining. Falling to its threshold is one of the two genuine warning signs, because the drive has run out of room to work around failures.
Media and data integrity errors: Uncorrected errors. Anything above zero means data was lost, which is the other genuine warning sign.

Common problems and fixes

Percentage Used is high and the drive seems fine: Because it is fine. That field measures writes against the warranty rating, and drives routinely exceed it by a wide margin in endurance testing. It is a reason to plan a replacement and check your backups, not a reason to stop using the drive today. Available Spare and media errors are what indicate an actual problem.
The drive runs hot and throttles under load: NVMe drives throttle above roughly 70 °C to protect the controller, which is by design. A heatsink helps considerably, and many motherboards ship with one that goes unused. Airflow matters too: a drive under a graphics card in a case with no front intake will throttle no matter what heatsink it has.

Frequently asked questions

What is a data unit?

A thousand 512-byte sectors, so 512 KB. Multiply the data units written figure by 512,000 to get bytes. It is an awkward unit and the reason raw NVMe logs look alarming: a number in the tens of millions is only a few terabytes.

How long will an NVMe drive last?

For ordinary use, longer than you will keep the machine. A consumer drive rated at 600 TBW written at 20 GB a day reaches its rating in about eighty years. Endurance is rarely what ends a drive life; controller failure, firmware bugs and the machine being replaced all come first.

Does SMART predict failure?

Poorly, and studies of large fleets agree. A substantial share of drives fail with no prior SMART warning at all. What SMART is good at is confirming a drive is already in trouble, which is why a clean report is weak evidence and a bad one is strong evidence.

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