Your SSD is telling you it's about to die - here's how to listen

Every SSD tracks its own health data since day one. Windows won't show you much, but a free tool and basic math will tell you when to worry.

Your SSD is telling you it's about to die - here's how to listen
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SSDs don't just die overnight; they show warnings through SMART data long before failure, tracking wear level, temperature, and total bytes written. The problem is that Windows buries this information behind status labels, so most people never see it until it's too late. I use a combination of built-in Windows tools and CrystalDiskInfo to keep tabs on my SSDs, and the whole process takes about two minutes.

Your SSD already tracks its own health

Most modern SSDs, whether they're SATA or NVMe, continuously monitor their own condition through a system called SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). It logs dozens of attributes in the background, and a handful of them are useful for predicting whether your drive is heading toward failure.

The metrics worth paying attention to are wear leveling count, total bytes written, reallocated sector count, temperature, and available spare. Wear leveling indicates how evenly data is distributed across NAND cells, since uneven wear shortens lifespan. Reallocated sector count tracks bad cells the controller has swapped out for reserve ones, temperature monitors thermal stress, and available spare shows how many reserve cells your drive has left. I'll break down what counts as a warning sign for each of these later in the article.

One thing worth noting is that SATA and NVMe drives report SMART data differently. NVMe uses a standardized health log, so the attributes are consistent across manufacturers. SATA SMART data, on the other hand, can vary - Samsung might label an attribute differently than Crucial, which makes interpretation slightly less straightforward.

Windows has a built-in SSD health check, but it's barely useful

Windows does offer a few native ways to check your SSD's health, but none of them give you enough detail to act on. They're pass/fail indicators at best - useful for a quick glance, not for understanding what's happening inside your drive.

Windows used to offer a quick check through the wmic diskdrive get status command, but Microsoft removed WMIC from Windows 11 starting with version 25H2. It only ever returned "OK" or "Pred Fail" anyway - a binary answer that told you almost nothing. Its removal isn't much of a loss.

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PowerShell's Get-PhysicalDisk cmdlet is slightly better. Open PowerShell as administrator, type Get-PhysicalDisk, and you'll see a "HealthStatus" column showing Healthy, Warning, or Unhealthy. On NVMe drives, you can also pipe it into Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter to pull wear percentage, but it's still surface-level data with no granularity.

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Windows 11 also tucks some health information into Settings. Open Settings, go to System > Storage > Advanced Storage Settings > Disks & Volumes, select your NVMe drive, and check its properties. You'll see estimated remaining life and temperature, which is helpful, but limited to NVMe drives and easy to miss if you don't know it's there.

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None of these options shows you the full SMART dataset. If you want actual detail, such as reallocated sectors, total bytes written, and wear leveling, you need a third-party tool.

CrystalDiskInfo gives you the full picture in seconds

CrystalDiskInfo is free, lightweight, and shows what Windows doesn't. It pulls every SMART attribute your SSD reports and lays it out in a single window. I've used it on both SATA and NVMe drives, and it consistently surfaces details that Windows' built-in tools completely ignore.

When you first open it, you'll see a color-coded health status at the top - Good (blue), Caution (yellow), or Bad (red) - along with your drive's current temperature and firmware version. Below that is the full SMART attribute table, listing every metric.

The health rating isn't arbitrary. CrystalDiskInfo flags "Caution" when any SMART attribute crosses its manufacturer-defined threshold, and "Bad" when the drive itself reports a critical failure state. If you see yellow or red, it's worth investigating which specific attribute triggered it, since not all warnings carry the same urgency.

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You can also keep CrystalDiskInfo running in the system tray through Function > Keep Running in System Tray. It monitors temperature in real time and can alert you if your drive overheats, particularly useful for NVMe SSDs in laptops where thermals tend to run tight.

These are the numbers that actually tell you your SSD is dying

Knowing which SMART attributes to watch is one thing - knowing when to worry is another. A single bad reading doesn't mean your drive is failing. Trends matter more than snapshots, so check these values every few months and watch for movement.

The reallocated sector count should ideally stay at zero. A small number after years of use isn't unusual, but if it's climbing steadily, your drive is running out of healthy cells. Percentage used reflects how much of the drive's rated endurance has been consumed - once it approaches 100%, you're operating on borrowed time. Available spare, specific to NVMe drives, shows remaining reserve cells. When it drops below the threshold value, the drive has almost nothing left to fall back on. You should also address sustained temperatures above 70°C, as it accelerates NAND degradation.

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You can also estimate remaining lifespan yourself. Find your drive's TBW (Terabytes Written) rating from the manufacturer's spec sheet, then check your total host writes in CrystalDiskInfo. TBW's exactly what it sounds like. It's a running total of every byte your system has written to the drive since day one. Subtract what you've written from the TBW rating, divide by your average daily write volume, and you'll get a rough estimate in days. However, most consumer users won't come close to hitting their TBW limit under normal workloads.

Don't wait for your SSD to tell you it's too late

SSD health monitoring pairs well with a solid backup routine. Even a healthy drive can fail from a power surge or a firmware bug. If you're running multiple drives, CrystalDiskInfo can monitor all of them simultaneously, which is worth setting up once and forgetting about. And if your drive does show warning signs, treat it as an opportunity for an upgrade rather than a crisis. Migrating to a newer generation NVMe drive while your data is still accessible is always easier than recovering it after a failure.

Guides Editor

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Yasir covers Windows, hardware, and privacy. A Windows user since XP and a Mechanical Engineer by training, he likes digging into the technical details most people skip over. His work has also been published on MakeUseOf, spanning everything from Windows optimizations to Excel deep dives. Outside of writing, he tinkers with his custom-built Ryzen rig, watches Impractical Jokers, and listens to way too much Lo-Fi.

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