smartctl drive Media_Wearout_Indicator values outside normal bounds

Question

I was attempting to put some monitoring in place to track the health of my SSD RAID on my production database. Normally I would expect a value of between 100 (new) and 0 (dead) for the Media_Wearout_Indicator, but I'm getting some large arbitrary value. Does this mean the disk is still in good health? IS there an arg or param I'm missing to display is value?

 [root@host ~]# smartctl -A /dev/sda -d sat+megaraid,00
 smartctl 6.2 2017-02-27 r4394 [x86_64-linux-3.10.0-327.el7.x86_64] (local build)
 Copyright (C) 2002-13, 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       -       3111267436
   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   001    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
   9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       24454
  12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       43
  13 Read_Soft_Error_Rate    0x0032   130   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       3111267436
 179 Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot   0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 180 Unused_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       66531
 181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total  0x003a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total  0x003a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 184 End-to-End_Error        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 194 Temperature_Internal    0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       29
 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x0032   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
 201 Unknown_SSD_Attribute   0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       644247126650
 226 Workld_Media_Wear_Indic 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       20
 227 Workld_Host_Reads_Perc  0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       45
 228 Workload_Minutes        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       1466891
 --->>>>  233 Media_Wearout_Indicator 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       95966
 245 Unknown_Attribute       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0     

Solution

The VALUE of Media_Wearout_Indicator is 100 in your case. The RAW_VALUE reports the number of cycles the NAND media has undergone (see this article). High value of RAW_VALUE doesn't indicate/predict a drive failure.

Also you can always compare your SMART report with reports for similar models in the repository of SMART reports.