Checking the health of a data drive and taking some precautions during its usage are essential things for a user to keep it away from a sudden loss of valuable data as well as keep running smoothly the computer.
Though among several types of data drives solid-state drive (SSD) is the popular one which has certain features that make it reliable and preferable over others, while there some cons it has undeniably which sometimes make it less trustworthy in comparison to its counterpart HDD, but in this post, you will learn about some tips and tricks regarding SSD health, lifespan as well as some precautions to assure safe your data. Also, we will examine some pros & cons of the SSD at the end of this article.
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Best 5 SSD Health Check Tools
In the following paragraphs, we have listed the 5 best reviewed SSD Health Check tools that may help you check regularly your SSD health and keep you away from losing your valuable data.
1. Official SSD Brand Tools
This is the best and foremost way to check the health and optimize the performance of your SSD. For instance, if you are using Kingston’s SSD, you can directly install Kingston SSD Manager from the official website of the company. Among various advantages of using official SSD brand tools, one is that you can reap the benefit of keeping you always updated about SSD firmware through its timely releasing new updates, while next is that the official tool of the company is more efficiently able to monitor, tune-up and optimize your drive comparatively with other vendors.
Other Official SSD Brand Tools include Intel SSD Toolbox, Toshiba SSD Utility, Samsung Magician, Western Digital Dashboard, and so on.
2. MiniTool Partition Wizard
In the line of best SSD health check tools, putting MiniTool Partition Wizard on second won’t go wrong. As its name indicates, MiniTool Partition Wizard may lead one wondering about its functionality whether it is a disk partition tool or an SSD health checker, so the answer is that MiniTool Partition Wizard where at one side works as a partition manager while it is one of the most powerful SSD health tools on the other, as it helps you analyze disk usage among its very features. The Disk Benchmark feature of MiniTool Partition Wizard enables you to measure and optimize your SSD performance as well as guides you on some safety measures regarding your drive and the valuable data. Through its faster benchmark tool, you can perform various actions in a while and tune up any SSD’s RAID controllers, storage, etc. In addition, MiniTool Partition Wizard allows you to migrate OS to HD or SSD in just a few seconds.
3. CrystalDiskInfo
Like the MiniTool Partition Wizard, CrystalDiskInfo is also one of the best hard drive (HDD) & solid-state drive (SSD) monitoring tools which helps you analyze various important parameters and vital stats associated with your HDD or SSD. The incredible features of CrystalDiskInfo let you know about your SSD health, performance, temperature, and total writes written by you. CrystalDiskInfo’s multi kinds of SSDs (like SATA, NVMe, or PCIe) supported feature and lightweight utility make it more reliable and popular among the users.
In addition, CrystalDiskInfo allows you to check firmware updates, read & write speeds, port details, power consumption, and S.M.A.R.T. information. Though with CrystalDiskInfo’s very advantages you may have to compromise if you have a Linux-based system as it doesn’t work on it.
4. Smartmontools
Another SSD health check tool is Smartmontools which includes two utility programs: SMRTD & SMARTCTL, which help control and monitor your drive (HDD & SSD). The smartest feature of Smartmontools is to analyze and let the user know about their possible degradation and written failure. Another alluring characteristic of Smartmontools is that it almost supports each kind of HDD & SSD disk including ATA/ATAPI/SATA etc. and is able to run on all OSs.
5. HWiNFO
Unlike the above tools which sometimes fail to detect accurate total host writes on an SSD due to some technical errors, HWiNFO won’t regret you ever in this context. As per general reviews by users, HWiNFO is likely the best system information and diagnostics utility that seamlessly reports SSD health parameters as well as total reads and writes. On the other hand, HWiNFO also helps you get updates about your SSD temperature, approx. lifespan, writing & other failures, and so on. Interestingly, you would be able to run easily HWiNFO utility on whatever OS you have like Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How to Know the Lifespan of my SSD?
If you would like to measure the lifespan of your data drive not necessarily of an SSD only, you must have a bit knowledge of the byte written value of that drive which in simple terms tells a user how much their drive has a capacity of data writes. For instance, in the case of an SSD, you must know that it is generally measured in Terabytes Written (aka TBW), while generally, an SSD has an 80TBW rating which means it has the capacity only to be written data up to 80 terabytes and once the user reaches to its maximum rating, the SSD fails or shows written errors. So, here you have learned that an SSD has a limited capacity to be written an amount of data on it which differs in accordance with its NAND cell types as well. Experts provide a numeric calculation in order to measure the lifespan of a drive, kindly go through with the below formula:
Lifespan of an SSD = (Number of Days x TBW x 1000) / (Total Writes (in GB) x 365)
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How do I increase my SSD Health & Lifespan?
Following paragraphs, you will go through with some tips and recommendations which probably help you mitigate damage risks of your SSD and lead to increase its health, performance, and lifespan.
Keep Writes Low on an SSD
Throughout various tips of increasing the health of an SSD, keeping the low amount of writes operations on an SSD is highly recommended as earlier mentioned that an SSD has a limited capacity of host writes (80TBW approx.) and once the user reaches the maximum limit of total host writes, it develops some errors or fails to work properly. Though there have been some restrictions to keep the low rate of write and delete operations if your device is booted on your SSD as there are some internal write and clear processes on regular basis, however, you may opt for some tips from below to minimize the health risks of your SSD:
- Keep an HDD as a secondary disk
- Disable Windows Automatic Updates
- Change cache location of internet browsers to HDD
- Install frequently used programs to HDD, if possible
- Keep disabled Startup programs
- Disable system hibernation
- Boot normally always instead of fast startup
Prevent an SSD from Overheating
As the overheating is bad for an SSD may increase its health risk, mitigating its duration, you can easily prevent overheating by taking some important measures from below:
- First, make sure that your SSD is used according to its specified temperature as it varies according to the sort of SSDs. (Check out its wrapping to learn specified temp. of your SSD)
- Make sure Safe Operation Temperature which means for an SSD, the operation temperature is recommended up to 70°C only while exceeding the maximum limit of 70°C relatively reduces the health of an SSD.
- Tune-up Case Airflow of your computer as if your device may find a problem in airflow case, it would severely affect the health and performance of your SSD. In this case, high airflow fans are highly recommended to exhaust and keep cool your SSD preventing it from overheating.
- Keep Data Transfer Amount Low as the transferring massive and bulk of data at a time requires higher usage of an SSD which leads to overheating relatively. In this case, small batches of data transfer are recommended which also reduces the risk of transfer failures.
Other tips to increase the health and lifespan of an SSD include SSD Overprovisioning which is also considered the best way to mitigate health risks of an SSD and helps increase its duration for more years. To learn more about SSD Overprovisioning, kindly check our next article Why does an SSD’s actual space differ from the advertised space?
Advantages & Disadvantages of an SSD
What are the Advantages of an SSD?
- Solid-State Drive (SSD) is much faster than Hard Disk (HDD)
- SSD is quite reliable comparatively because of its performance
What are the Disadvantages of an SSD?
- SSD has less lifespan relatively in comparison with an HDD
- SSD has high risks of sudden failure than an HDD
- SSD is less trustworthy in terms of storing important data
- SSD has a limited amount of host writes than an HDD which has no limit
- SSD loses its host writes on new write and delete operations
- SSD usually fails to get detected in BIOS after a sudden failure
- SSD has no sign to go down in comparison with HDD which gives some clues
- A dead SSD has nearly no possibility of data recovery
