I have installed SAT SMART driver and it says SMART Driver installed but not loaded. I have a Samsung Portable SSD T5 which is external and is the boot drive. I see this drive in Lifespan but it says NOT SUPPORTED. What am I doing wrong?

Try restarting, and if that does not load the SAT SMART driver, please send a message to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . You will receive a reply by email. Thank you.

Some external drives are not supported by the SAT SMART driver, which is an open source project.

I have Lifespan installed now and was surprised by some results. I have one SSD I have abused and reinstalled various systems for several years which shows 99%. My main drive shows only 80%. These are just interesting target points but I am. without any real context.
First, I understand any drive can fail without warning even after testing in good condition. I would also worry if my drive tested at only 40% of it's useful life remaining.
My assumption is that the figures represented with Lifespan are the industry standard of expected use/rewrite/failure for solid state memory.

Each of the memory cells can be written to a finite number of times. The drive showing 40% of its useful life remaining has used up the other 60% of the original number of "write events". Eventually the cells will no longer be able to be written to, because the voltage required to write to them is now too high (explained in the manual, and news to me). I do not think anything more can be said about that, other than to keep an eye on it, which is what the program is doing, automatically,

It will be interesting to see, after the program has been in use by more people over more time, just how low some of the numbers get. Thanks for providing your details.

I rewrote posting #11604 because the original text implied that 60% of the memory cells on the SSD in question were now entirely dead, which is not the case.

I just installed Lifespan on a macbook with an internal SSD that has been in use for several years. Lifespan reports 100% life remaining. I find that hard to believe. What does Lifespan actually measure? I have read the manual but still don't understand what Lifespan is measuring.

What Lifespan measures is explained in posting #11604 above.

I do not know if is possible to explore through software the possibility that the program is in error in reporting the 100% figure. Please send a message to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . You will receive a reply by email. Thank you.

The Lifespan Preferences window pops up several times a day. As there is nothing to change I just close it. Can this pop up behavior be off?

Thanks for your report.

I have seen this happen myself, but so far, I have not noticed a particular pattern to it. I will ask about this.

The Lifespan window should be appearing once a week, as part of checking automatically for updates. If you remove the check from "Automatically Check for Updates", you should no longer see the window. Screen capture below.