SSDde

SSDde, short for Solid-State Drive Diagnostic Exchange, is a proposed open standard intended to describe, exchange, and validate diagnostic telemetry from solid-state drives. The standard aims to provide a common data model for health, endurance, performance, and error reporting to improve interoperability among drive firmware, operating systems, and management tools.

SSDde defines a neutral schema for telemetry that can be generated by drive firmware, translated by host drivers, and consumed by management software. It addresses varied vendor implementations by offering a consistent set of core attributes while allowing extensions for vendor-specific data.

The concept emerged from a collaboration among storage vendors, researchers, and standards groups beginning in 2020. The first public release, SSDde 1.0, appeared in 2022, with subsequent revisions SSDde 1.1 and 1.2 focusing on security, privacy, and transmission efficiency.

Its data model includes core entities such as health status, endurance counters, wear leveling metrics, error logs, and throughput statistics. The standard supports two transport formats: a compact binary wire format for on-wire exchange and a JSON representation for human inspection. Optional schemas cover privacy-preserving telemetry and access control.

Implementation typically spans three layers: device firmware exposes telemetry, the host or driver translates data into the SSDde model, and management software stores and analyzes records. Adoption remains partial, with experimental support from several NVMe-driven platforms and monitoring suites. The standard is intended to be backward-compatible with existing SMART-like concepts.

SSDde aims to improve interoperability, fault diagnosis, and predictive maintenance in data centers and consumer devices. Critics point to potential vendor lock-in, overhead in telemetry, and the slow pace of cross-vendor standardization.

See also: SMART, NVMe, storage telemetry, data center monitoring standards.