You don’t have to wait for your SSD to go sideways before testing it for issues. Instead of waking up one day to sudden crashes and other erratic behavior, you can take preventive measures from time to time to check your drive’s health and back up your data before it’s too late.
Being proactive costs nothing but the time spent checking and testing the drive, something you only need to do a few times a year and can finish in about a dozen minutes or so. That sure beats having to deal with crashes and other issues when it’s too late. Below, you can find some useful tools and utilities that can tell you whether your SSD is in good health in no time, along with instructions on how to use them.
Check your SSD’s S.M.A.R.T. status with CrystalDiskInfo
CrystalDiskInfo is a handy little app, at its free
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a monitoring system built into most modern SSDs. It constantly monitors the device for health, endurance, and errors, and you can access S.M.A.R.T. data with certain apps. My recommendation is CrystalDiskInfo because it’s free, easy to use, and vendor-agnostic.
After you download and install CrystalDiskInfo, open the app and select any disk on your PC. There, you’ll get a bunch of info showing the drive’s health, the total amount of data written to it, various S.M.A.R.T. attributes, and more.
As you can see in the screenshot below, my disk (a Western Digital SATA SSD that’s more than half a decade old) is in pretty good shape. Its health is 98%, and although more than 28.5TB (28,596GB) has been written to it, it shows no issues.
If your SSD is in bad shape, CrystalDiskInfo may display a yellow Caution label informing you that the drive has bad sectors or is wearing out. This doesn’t mean failure is imminent, but you should start thinking about replacing the drive and backing up your data, just to be safe. If the drive is near the end of its life, you’ll see a red label reading Bad. In that case, you should back up the drive as soon as possible. In general, you should be fine as long as your SSD’s health is 70% or higher.
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Run S.M.A.R.T. tests in your SSD vendor’s monitoring app
Most SSD makers offer first-party drive monitoring apps
CrystalDiskInfo is a solid tool for a basic S.M.A.R.T. parameter checkup, but even if you don’t find any warnings, I recommend running S.M.A.R.T. tests just to be sure, which are available in disk monitoring utilities offered by most SSD manufacturers.
You’ve got Samsung Magician for Samsung SSDs, SanDisk Dashboard for SanDisk and Western Digital SSDs, SSD S.M.A.R.T. Tool for TEAMGROUP SSDs, and so on. I’ll use the SanDisk Dashboard app to show you how to run S.M.A.R.T. tests since I own WD SSDs, but you can find out how to perform them in other vendor apps with a quick Google search.
- Storage capacity
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2TB
- Hardware Interface
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PCIe Gen4x4
Firstly, download and install SandDisk Dashboard. Once you open it, click on the disk you want to run S.M.A.R.T. test on, and then click the “Tools” button. Once there, scroll down until you see the “Diagnostic” tab and then run either the short or extended S.M.A.R.T. test. I recommend running the extended variant since it doesn’t take that much time—about a dozen minutes. If it completes without issues, you’re golden. If it doesn’t, you might want to start backing up data, or use the next app in the SSD test arsenal, Hard Disk Sentinel.
Analyze the drive with Hard Disk Sentinel
Hard Disk Sentinel is arguably the best third-party disk analysis and monitoring tool out there
Hard Disk Sentinel is a powerful storage drive monitoring and analysis tool that provides a much wider selection of pertinent data than CrystalDiskInfo and similar apps, which only show basic S.M.A.R.T. attributes. The app is paid, but you can use the trial version to check your drive’s status for free.
After you download and install the app (pick the trial version), open it, and you’ll be greeted by the home screen, which shows all the disks (even external drives and SD cards) connected to your PC. Just click on any of them, and the Overview window will show you all the important data you need to know about your disk.
As you can see below, my WD Blue SATA SSD sits at 99% health even though it has been working for almost 1,860 days, or more than five years. It has one bad sector, but that isn’t necessarily cause for alarm, especially if the drive otherwise appears healthy. Now, while the estimated remaining lifetime for the disk is only “more than 99 days” (this number can go as high as 1,000), you shouldn’t worry too much if the rest of the data shows that your disk is in good shape.
To make sure it works correctly, you can run short and extended S.M.A.R.T. tests on it (Disk > Short Self-test or Disk > Extended Self-test), and if the disk passes the extended self-test with flying colors and its health is high, it likely won’t start giving you problems anytime soon, even if it has a bad sector or two and its estimated remaining lifetime is relatively low.
On the other hand, if it can’t complete S.M.A.R.T. tests, if Hard Disk Sentinel lets you know that it found a number of bad sectors on the disk, or if the SSD shows certain warning signs, the best course of action is to back up any important data you store on the SSD even if its health is relatively high. If the drive’s health is low (below 70%, especially below 25%), it’s recommended to start backing up your data and replace the disk sooner rather than later, even if it manages to complete self-tests.
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Please stop assuming your NVMe SSD is dead when it stops working
You should check your SSD’s health a few times a year
The most sensible approach to SSD care is to preventively check its overall health, S.M.A.R.T. status, and run extensive self-tests a few times per year, especially if you store important data on it.
This gives you a better chance of spotting problems before they lead to crashes, data loss, or the SSD switching to read-only mode. If that happens, cloning the drive can help you recover the data stored on it.
