SSD Health – Do You Ever Check Yours?
Most of us keep an eye on temperatures, Windows updates and available disk space, but how often do you actually check the health of your SSD or NVMe drive?Unlike an old mechanical hard drive, an SSD has no moving parts, but that doesn't mean it will last forever.
SSDs have a limited number of writes, and modern drives keep quite a lot of useful information about their condition through SMART data.
Things worth checking include:
- Drive temperature
- Percentage used / remaining life
- Total data written
- Power-on hours
- Media or data integrity errors
- Reallocated or bad blocks
- Critical warnings
Windows
One of the easiest options is CrystalDiskInfo, which gives a simple health indication along with the drive's SMART information.Many SSD manufacturers also provide their own utilities, such as Samsung Magician or Crucial Storage Executive.
PowerShell can give you a quick basic check too:
Get-PhysicalDisk | Select FriendlyName, MediaType, HealthStatus, OperationalStatus, Size
Linux
For SATA SSDs and hard drives, smartctl is extremely useful:sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
For an NVMe drive you can use:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0
or, if nvme-cli is installed:
sudo nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0
Don't Wait for a Warning
SMART monitoring is useful, but it isn't a replacement for backups.A drive can report that everything is healthy today and still fail tomorrow. Anything important should always exist somewhere else as well.
After recently doing a bit of work with drives myself, it's something I've started paying more attention to.
Do you regularly check the health of your SSDs, or do you just use them until something starts going wrong?
And has anyone here actually had an SSD or NVMe drive fail without warning?