These days, SSDs are so durable that many people will never have to deal with SSD failure. But there’s another side to that coin: when SSDs fail, they often do it quietly, and you may not notice until it’s too late and your data’s already lost.
Tracking SSD health is one way to catch the problems before they ever appear, but there’s more than one metric to pay attention to. Protect your data and stay vigilant—here’s what I do to keep track of my SSD health.
Why SSD health can be misleading
It’s always best to dig deeper.
Credit: Corbin Davenport / How-To Geek
SSDs are finicky things sometimes. Unlike HDDs, they run on NAND flash memory, which has a finite lifespan by default. Every SSD has a rated terabytes written (TBW) limit based on its NAND flash memory, which has a finite lifespan. Once you approach or exceed that, the drive’s reliability can drop, but many keep going strong or fail for unrelated reasons. What’ll happen to yours? It’s anybody’s guess.
To prevent catastrophic failure, many people use programs like CrystalDiskInfo or even Windows’ built-in disk health utility to monitor SSD health. This is great, but different tools monitor different things, and SSD health percentage doesn’t always cover all the bases.
The main problem is that SSD health isn’t some universal number that every tool calculates the same way. One app might treat it as a straight wear estimate, another will consider spare blocks, and Windows may just tell you it’s all peachy without explaining what’s under the hood.
On NVMe SSDs, the health percentage you see being reported is often just a simplified version of wear. It’s usually tied to a SMART value like percentage used. Essentially, this tracks how much of its rated endurance the SSD has gone through, and nothing else.
But a drive can show 95% health and still be collecting error logs or running into integrity issues that can still knock it out. Endurance rating is just one metric and one part of overall SSD health, which is why I tend to look at a few more stats when inspecting my SSDs.
The stats that actually matter
This is everything you need to pay attention to.
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
Wear isn’t what typically kills modern SSDs. These drives are rated at hundreds, or even over a thousand, TBW. Unless you put them in a NAS (which isn’t always the best idea) and write hundreds of gigabytes per day, you’ll probably never reach that number.
Errors are the likelier culprits when an SSD fails.
The first thing you should check is whether the drive reports any kind of critical warning. In CrystalDiskInfo, that’s the big banner at the top left under “Health Status.” The percentage is a wear indicator, and it’s useful, but it’s less urgent than critical warnings. Many experts say that around 70% of SSD health is a good point where you’d think about replacing it.
Next, dig into your drive’s available spare. This is your SSD’s built-in safety net that tracks spare blocks on your drive, which are necessary to replace worn-out ones. Some tools show this directly, but it may also be buried in the SMART list. Once your SSD runs low on spare blocks, it’s getting closer to the point where it can’t quietly address potential issues on its own anymore.
After that, inspect all those stats that are fairly obvious (but rarely checked under a microscope) signs of data risk. Media/data integrity errors, uncorrectable errors, and basically anything that’s an error log needs to be checked out. Again, these will often be found in the SMART attribute table or displayed as NVMe health fields.
How to check SSD health in Windows
These safety precautions will keep your data safer.
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
My (and everyone else’s) favorite method of checking SSD health in Windows is CrystalDiskInfo. It’s a free tool that gives you a solid rundown of what’s going on, including a lot more than just a simple status message. But there’s a lot of value in trying different things and digging deeper.
In CrystalDiskInfo, beyond checking the top bar, the health status, and the temperature, look through the summary fields. This includes things like total writes and power-on hours, which are not indicative of possible SSD failure, but can give you a good idea of how much your SSD has already been through.
Next, check the SMART attribute list underneath, and keep your eyes peeled for signs of data integrity trouble, including error counts, uncorrectable errors, critical warnings, and unsafe shutdowns. If there are no media/data integrity errors and the error log is empty or close to empty, you’re all good.
It never hurts to get a second opinion from Window itself. Start with PowerShell, which you can find by typing “PowerShell” into Windows Search, then right-clicking it and running it with administrator privileges. Then, run the following command:
Get-PhysicalDisk | Select FriendlyName, MediaType, HealthStatus, OperationalStatus, Size
You can also go deeper with:
Get-PhysicalDisk | ForEach-Object
$_.FriendlyName
Get-StorageReliabilityCounter -PhysicalDisk $_
There are a few other ways to check SSD health with SMART, but these two are a good starting point. HWiNFO also displays drive-related information.
When to start worrying and consider buying a new SSD
NAND flash is not forever.
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
How much do you care about your data? Because that’s going to play the biggest part in whether you should buy a new SSD or not.
If you’re not too worried about data loss, it’s alright to use an SSD that’s seen its better days. But for most people, if your SSD is returning errors, has considerable wear, or is causing problems, it’s time to cut your losses and replace it.
Things like crashes, freezes, or painfully slow performance are all signs of an impending crash. The SSD may or may not be the culprit, but if it is, you run the risk of complete data loss, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. However, poor performance may also be a sign of your SSD running out of free space to use, so look into that first.
The most important thing to remember is that SSD wear is a planning tool, not a panic button. It’s there to warn you early enough so you can plan your exit and buy a new drive, so heed the warning to keep your PC running smoothly. Most of all, keep your data backed up and SSD troubles will never turn into catastrophes.
