SSDs may have a lower failure rate than hard drives, but they can still wear out over time, depending on the daily workload and usage conditions. Since the NAND flash inside SSDs has a limited number of write cycles, it's helpful to know when you might have to replace your drive. Every SSD (or HDD) has a set of S.M.A.R.T attributes (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) that enable you to gauge the drive's health. This system can track up to 255 attributes, but most manufacturers use only around 20–30 attributes to measure drive performance, wear, and health. By studying your SSD's S.M.A.R.T. data, you can determine how much of your drive's lifespan is still ahead of it. And if there are warning signs, you can act in time to protect your data.

Your SSD is "SMARTer" than you think

It monitors dozens of reliability metrics

Your SSD's firmware constantly tracks almost every attribute connected to its operation, and stores it in a specific area of the flash memory. While the S.M.A.R.T system can track up to 255 attributes, SSD manufacturers design for a small set of attributes to be monitored. From things like Remaining Life/Percentage Used and Reallocated Sector Count to Available Spare Blocks and Erase Fail Count, multiple attributes can help you get a sense of your drive's health. The Remaining Life attribute measures how much data has been written to the drive, and compares it to its endurance rating (in TBW) to calculate how much of the theoretical lifespan has been depleted. The Available Spare Blocks tells you how many spare NAND cells your SSD has been forced to use due to other cells having completely worn out.

Most consumer SSDs keep working without issues up to 80% of their designated lifespan (indicated by the TBW rating). After that, however, you should consider offloading your data and looking for a replacement. While many SSDs don't "fail" even after the TBW rating is exceeded, they often enter into a read-only state. You won't be able to write any new data, but you could read data off it for some time. This scenario means you need to migrate to a new drive as soon as you can, unless you want to risk losing your data. Creating regular data backups is recommended, but despite that, you shouldn't keep using a drive that's near the end of its lifespan. The downside is that it could fail at any moment, and you won't be able to boot into your system. If you have a spare drive ready to go, that's another matter. You could wait for your existing SSD to stop working, and swap it with your new drive when it eventually dies.

How do you view your SSD's S.M.A.R.T data?

First-party and third-party options

Your SSD keeps track of more attributes than you know what to do with, but how do you actually get eyes on it? Well, you have more ways than one to study your SSD's S.M.A.R.T. data. The one that I like to use is one of the most popular third-party options, i.e., CrystalDiskInfo. It's an incredibly lightweight and uncluttered utility that scans all of your drives and displays the drive health and temperature at the top for each of them. You can switch between the tabs for each of your drives, including HDDs, to see the values for multiple attributes. The Health Status at the top will show Good, Caution, or Bad, depending on the remaining lifespan of the drive, calculated based on the attributes I mentioned in the previous section. This section will also display the remaining lifespan as a percentage for SSDs, but not for HDDs, as they don't have a predictable write cycle limit.

If you already have a first-party tool from your SSD's manufacturer, you can use that to check your drive health, too. You'll only be able to see a summary of the S.M.A.R.T. data in the form of a single "Drive Health" percentage on most of these tools. I've used WD Dashboard in the past for two of my drives, and I quite liked its UI and features. Depending on your SSD brand, you can choose from SandDisk Dashboard, Samsung Magician, Seagate SeaTools, Adata SSD Toolbox, and Crucial Storage Executive, among others. These tools also have the added utility of updating your SSD's firmware, which has a lot of benefits of its own. Your particular software will alert you if there's a firmware update available for your drive. Besides, you can also check out additional features, such as "Game Mode", depending on your drive's manufacturer.

You can do your bit to extend your SSD's lifespan

Give your SSD the best chance at survival

Checking your SSD's health status and safeguarding your data is always recommended, but what's also a must is doing your best to extend your drive's lifespan. Your SSD may not have mechanical parts, but it's still prone to other forms of damage and lifespan degradation. You can at least minimize the chances of a drive failure during its natural lifespan, so that you replace it before it ever develops any faults or threatens the integrity of your data.

You can start by ensuring enough airflow inside your case and installing a heatsink on your NVMe SSD if it's known to run particularly hot. Most Gen5 SSDs will need a heatsink, but even some high-end Gen4 drives demand one. Then, ensure you don't fill your SSD to the brim. Doing so leaves little room for efficient garbage collection, and can lead to write amplification, reducing your drive's lifespan unnecessarily. You also need to avoid heavy write activity on your primary SSD. Gaming isn't a write-heavy workload, but virtual machines, containers, and databases certainly are. Using your main SSD as a scratch disk is also not recommended, since it amounts to tons of temporary files being written to the disk. Other ways to increase your SSD's endurance are disabling hibernation, adjusting the pagefile size, and turning indexing off for certain folders. These processes may not account for much individually, but together, they can equate to a lot of unnecessary write activity on your SSD.

SSD S.M.A.R.T. report can save your precious data

Your SSD is already doing the heavy lifting of monitoring every aspect of its operation. All you need to do to protect your data is ensure you check the S.M.A.R.T. data once in six months or so. Checking this data is quite simple, thanks to first-party tools or third-party ones like CrystalDiskInfo. These tools can give you the percentage of lifespan remaining for each of your drives, and CrystalDiskInfo can also show a lot more detail if you wish to see it.