Summary
It’s a good habit to periodically check the health of your NVMe SSD. Although rare, they can fail without warning, taking your precious data with them. Normally, you’d turn to a S.M.A.R.T. monitoring program to check your drive’s health, but there’s practically no need for it if all you want is a simple answer to whether your drive is going to fail anytime soon. Hidden inside Windows’ Settings app is a menu that lets you see your NVMe SSD’s overall health, giving you a chance to back up your data if things look bad. But there are some caveats. First, the menu only shows your drive’s overall status, and it’s nowhere near as detailed as a S.M.A.R.T. report. Additionally, it only works for NVMe SSDs: if you have a SATA SSD, or an HDD, you’d still need to use S.M.A.R.T. monitoring for detailed information, or the Get-PhysicalDisk command in Windows PowerShell for a basic health check. Accessing and making sense of your SSD’s health report The numbers, Mason, what do they mean? To view your NVMe SSD’s health status, you’ll need to go down several levels in the Settings app. So, launch the Settings app and navigate to System > Storage > Advanced storage settings > Disks & volumes. You’ll see a list of all the storage drives and partitions on your system. Click the Properties option corresponding to the NVMe SSD connected to your PC. In the Window that opens, you’ll see a Drive health section that contains three parameters:
- Estimated remaining life: This tells you the estimated remaining lifespan on the drive. A higher value is better. But again, it’s an estimate based on the standards set by the manufacturer and your drive won’t necessarily fail once it reaches 0. This value is known to go down to negative numbers as well.
- Available spare: SSD manufacturers keep aside extra space as a “reserve” that’s hidden from the system. As the SSD’s NAND cells wear out, it will use those in the reserve to compensate for them. A higher spare value means the drive is in good health because it doesn’t need to use up the space that’s reserved.
- Temperature: Displays the current operating temperature of your SSD. This value fluctuates depending on your SSD’s current workload and the manufacturer. Typically, temperatures around 50°C–70°C are normal for NVMe SSDs under load. The above attributes are basic, but they give you a good idea of your drive’s overall state. If you notice any of the values is sub-optimal, it’s best to identify what exactly is wrong with your drive by checking its S.M.A.R.T. status using tools like CrystalDiskInfo, or better yet, your SSD manufacturer’s own disk management utility. Windows displays critical health warnings in the Drive health section It’s a sign to back up your drive yesterday The Drive health section may also display critical warnings if Windows determines your SSD could be failing. These include messages like:
- Reliability is degraded: The drive has significant internal errors (like an accumulation of bad blocks) that are affecting its reliability.
- Spare capacity is low: The reserve space has been used up and is lower than recommended. This happens when a large amount of your drive’s primary NAND cells are no longer fit to store data, prompting the SSD to use up the reserve.
- Drive is set to read-only: You can read data from the drive, but can’t write to it. If this happens out of the blue, there’s likely an internal error on the drive. It’s best to back up your drive if you see these warnings. You can simply copy important files to a different drive. Additionally, click the Back up now button in the Drive health section itself to enable OneDrive folder syncing to back up your user directories to OneDrive automatically. You can enable Windows File History to save multiple copies of your files to an external drive. By default, File History backs up your user folders, but you can add other custom folders too. Is it safe to keep using an SSD with health warnings? Yes, but only for things you can afford to lose. There’s no telling when an SSD that’s already displaying health warnings will fail, which is both good and bad. I’ve had SSDs fail on me within days of critical warnings, and others that kept chugging along for months. Regardless, if you can’t replace that SSD yet, avoid heavy, sustained writes to it as those are what stress it out the most. At least you can get a sense of how your SSD is managing with this hidden tool, though.