S.M.A.R.T. lifetime hours resetting to zero

How you can see from SMART attribute 9, your SSD lifetime is correcly reported in the full report:

  9 Power_On_Hours      0x0032   093   093   000    Old_age   Always       -       33168

On the other hand, the LifeTime(hours) value reported for self/short/long tests seems to wrap at ~49 days, similar to how SMART error reporting works. From smartctl man page:

This is displayed in the form Dd+HH:MM:SS.msec where D is the number of days, HH is hours, MM is minutes, SS is seconds and msec is milliseconds. [Note: this time stamp wraps after 2^32 milliseconds, or 49 days 17 hours 2 minutes and 47.296 seconds.]

This is one of the field where the once consumer related SMART heritage shows, as it is (was?) uncommon for a desktop to have >49 days uptime.


Most disks with SMART would use 16 bits to store this value, giving 65,535 hours before reset.

Yours appears to wrap after 1152 hours which is not a convenient power of 2 and is quite odd.

Here's a disk that has just completed its second time around that clock, with 139,895 hours of power-on time, but the SMART self tests wrap at 65,535 hours.

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of
# 1  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      8823         -
# 2  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     65041         -
# 3  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     63134         -
# 4  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     43108         -
# 5  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     42235         -
# 6  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     30613         -
# 7  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     11535         -
# 8  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      5934         -
# 9  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      2667         -
#10  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      2666         -
#11  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     54241         -
#12  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     47079         -
#13  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     43109         -
#14  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     43071 ... etc

Yes this disk has about 16 years of active power-on time.

9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   001   001   000    Old_age   Always 139895

I'd suspect your Apple SSD has some extra firmware fudges going on allowing it to report odd times. It would be interesting to check the SMART values on a non-apple disk, attached by USB perhaps? Or to check an apple firmware disk in a non-apple system.