I just purchased a new SSD and I'm trying to figure out how to monitor the expected lifetime of it. When I run

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

it reports

...

General SMART Values:

Offline data collection status:  (0x80) **Offline data collection activity

                    was never started**.

...

Furthermore I note that some of the statistics are indicated to be updated "Always" or "Offline":

$ sudo smartctl -data -A /dev/sda

...

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE    

...    

198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   100   100   001    Old_age   **Offline**      -       0

199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   100   100   001    Old_age   **Always**       -       0

202 **Perc_Rated_Life_Used**    0x0018   100   100   001    Old_age   **Offline**      -       0

206 Write_Error_Rate        0x000e   100   100   001    Old_age   **Always**       -       0

Does this mean that the "Offline" stats are not up-to-date?

Will the "Offline" stats update themselves with time, or need I trigger them to update somehow?

I am particularly interested in the value indicating the lifetime of the SSD, "Perc_Rated_Life_Used", which is labeled as "Offline".

Using the --offlineauto=on flag (credit to Michael Krell's suggestion below) as so:

sudo smartctl --offlineauto=on -a /dev/sda

produces a new output section:

=== START OF ENABLE/DISABLE COMMANDS SECTION ===

SMART Automatic Offline Testing Enabled **every four hours**.

However, the smart data section still reports:

Offline data collection status:  (0x80) Offline data collection activity

                                 **was never started**.

This is on a newly updated Ubuntu 13.1016.04 system.