Have you ever wondered what the status of an SSD working inside your device is? What is its temperature? Does it work at peak performance or not? In this tutorial, you will learn how to check the health status and statistics of SSD usage.
Because an SSD contains operating system data and much of your critical information, it will be important to monitor its current state; Unfortunately, Windows does not provide any tools for monitoring the status and instantaneous statistics. This is where the CrystalDiskInfo tool comes in handy. This tool is free software that displays important information about each storage device connected to the motherboard, and this is a good thing for people who use SSDs.
To find out what’s going on inside your SSD, you should first download the free version of CrystalDiskInfo. After installing and running it and selecting the desired drive, you will get useful information about it. For example, in the image below, you can see the 1TB Intel 660p SSD data.
What is very important here is the information that is shown at the top of the program; In particular, the simple components identified as “health status”. Drive health index, in fact from the interpretation of SMART information orSelf-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or in other words, the technology of monitoring, analyzing, and reporting the status of all types of solid-state drives and hard drives. This technology, which is found in all drives today, has the ability to detect and record all errors and bugs caused by software and hardware problems, and if there is a problem in the performance of the component, alert you by changing the values associated with Gives. If you see any status other than “good” in the health index, you should go to the bottom of the program, which takes information from SMART, and check which of the available parameters has been changed and highlighted. Regardless of any problem that arises, it is wise to consider buying a new drive.
At the top right of the program, you can find useful information about the total amount of data read and written on the drive, the total time it is on and the number of times the drive is turned on. As you can see in the picture, the number 62 terabytes indicate the total amount of data written on the SSD from the beginning until now. This is one of the most important parameters to know about SSDs. If not all solid-state drives; But most of them have a limit on the amount of data that can be written, and the life span of SSDs is determined based on certain cycles of writing / erasing and rewriting the data on them; So with this number, you can guess how much life an SSD has left. In this model, Intel claims that up to 200 terabytes of write operations will be performed without any problems. So it can be estimated that this drive has been around for a long time.
In the middle section, there is a box called Transfer Mode, which can be used to find out the communication standard between the motherboard port and SSD memory. This will come in handy when you want to know if your SSD complies with the motherboard port standard based on the communication standard announced by the manufacturer. In general, it is very important to know this; Because you may have an SSD with PCIe x4 standard, but the standard set for the port on your device motherboard is PCIe x2 and you will not be able to use half of its data transfer capacity.
Finally, if you are sensitive to the data displayed and its accuracy, and you want the information reported from the SMART unit to be flawless and get the most accurate interpretation without any errors, it is better to go to the software that the manufacturers of storage drives, as Dedicated to the products they produce. For example, Intel Recommends Memory & Storage Tool software for your generated memories. In this software, in addition to general and basic information, you will see a set of values and information that many may not be aware of the philosophy of its existence and application, and to find its meaning, need to search the Internet; Because different manufacturers choose specific titles for each of the values reported by the drive monitoring unit, these titles will be different for each manufacturer; So if you are not very sensitive, CrystalDiskInfo software is the best option to check the status of your SSD drive.
