How to Check SSD Health on Windows and Mac: The Back-Up-First Guide

CodexFuse Team · 2026-10-27T23:33:46.546Z · 13 min read min read

Check your SSD health in minutes: the Windows 11 Drive health page for NVMe, PowerShell for SATA, and the Mac SMART check — plus what the numbers mean and when to back up first.

Learning how to check SSD health takes about five minutes, and the check itself is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what the numbers mean — and what to do first when they look bad. A solid-state drive can work perfectly on Monday and be gone on Tuesday, with no warning at all. That is why the first step in this guide is not a settings menu. It is a backup. Before you open a single tool, understand what an SSD is: your files live in NAND flash chips, and a small controller sits between those chips and your computer, keeping an internal map of where everything is. When that map or the controller fails, the data may still be in the chips — but the drive can no longer find it.

This guide covers the whole check on both platforms: the Windows 11 Drive health page for NVMe drives, PowerShell commands that work on any drive, the Mac SMART check, and the failure signs that decide whether you should copy your files off today or power the drive off and stop touching it.

How Do I Check My SSD Health?

Checking your SSD health means reading the drive's own self-monitoring numbers and deciding what they say. On Windows 11, open Settings, go to System, then Storage, then Advanced storage settings, then Disks & volumes, and open the drive's Properties. On a Mac, open System Report and look at the SMART Status line. If either one reports a problem, back up your files before you do anything else.

1. Back up first. Copy the files you cannot replace to a different physical drive or to cloud storage — never to another folder on the same SSD. A drive you already suspect can get worse with use.
2. Read the built-in health page. Windows 11 shows a Drive health section for NVMe SSDs; macOS shows a SMART Status line in System Report.
3. Run the PowerShell check. If the Drive health section is missing, your drive is probably SATA — use the PowerShell commands in the Windows section below instead.
4. Read the numbers, then act. Healthy with zero uncorrected errors means keep your backups current. A warning, a read-only drive, or rising errors means back up now and plan a replacement.

Back Up First: The One Rule Before Any Check

Every source for this article says the same thing, and it goes before every method below: if you already suspect the drive, copy what matters off it first. A failing drive can get worse with use, and nothing in this guide needs to happen before the backup does. Copy the most important files first — the ones you cannot replace — not the whole drive in folder order. And copy them to a different physical drive or to cloud storage, never to another partition on the same SSD.

There is one exception, and it matters: if the drive has already gone read-only, vanished from the BIOS, started showing the wrong name or capacity, or will not boot after a power loss, do not keep powering it on to run checks. Each power cycle on a failing controller is another chance for it to get worse. Copy the critical files off once if you still can, then stop. The section on failure signs below explains which group you are in.

How to Check SSD Health on Windows 11

Windows 11 gives you three built-in ways to check, and you do not need to install anything for the first two. The Settings page is the easiest. PowerShell covers every drive, including the ones Settings cannot see. A quick command-line check gives a one-word verdict when that is all you need.

Method 1: The Drive Health Page (NVMe Only)

Open Start, then Settings, then System, then Storage. Expand Advanced storage settings, select Disks & volumes, and choose Properties for the SSD you want to check. The Drive health section shows three numbers. Estimated remaining life is a percentage based on the manufacturer's prediction of how long the drive will last. Available spare is how much of the drive's spare capacity is left, from 0% to 100% — an SSD keeps spare blocks in reserve to replace worn-out ones. Temperature is the temperature of the whole drive in degrees Celsius.

If you do not see a Drive health section at all, your drive is most likely a SATA SSD or a hard disk. Windows monitors NVMe SSDs this way, and not SATA SSDs or hard drives. Skip to the PowerShell methods below — they work on any drive.

Method 2: PowerShell for Any Drive

Right-click the Start button and choose Terminal (Admin), then run this command for a quick verdict on every drive at once:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Format-Table DeviceId, FriendlyName, MediaType, BusType, HealthStatus, OperationalStatus

Read the table this way: MediaType should say SSD. BusType tells you how the drive is connected — NVMe, SATA, or USB. HealthStatus should say Healthy; Warning or Unhealthy means Windows has flagged the drive. OperationalStatus should read OK. Anything other than Healthy and OK deserves your attention right away.

For more than a one-word verdict, run the reliability counters in the same window:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter | Format-Table DeviceId, Temperature, TemperatureMax, Wear, PowerOnHours, ReadErrorsUncorrected, WriteErrorsUncorrected

Wear is the share of the drive's rated write endurance it has used, as a percentage — at 100 percent, the drive has reached its estimated wear limit. Temperature and TemperatureMax are the current and maximum operating temperatures in degrees Celsius. PowerOnHours is how long the drive has been powered on since it was made. ReadErrorsUncorrected and WriteErrorsUncorrected are errors the drive could not fix on its own — you want both at zero. Not every drive fills in every counter, and a blank field is not a fault.

Method 3: The Quick WMIC Verdict

If you want the fastest possible answer, open Command Prompt as administrator, type WMIC, press Enter, then type diskdrive get status and press Enter. If the window shows OK, the drive is healthy by Windows' own basic check. If it shows Pred Fail, the drive is predicting its own failure — back up your data and follow up with a SMART tool. This method gives no detail, so treat it as a smoke alarm, not a diagnosis.

Method 4: Confirm That TRIM Is Turned On

TRIM — Windows calls it delete notifications — tells your SSD which blocks were freed up when you deleted a file. It keeps the drive fast and avoids needless work. To check it, run:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

The wording is a double negative, so read it carefully. NTFS DisableDeleteNotify = 0 means TRIM is enabled, while 1 means it is disabled. On NTFS, TRIM is on by default unless an administrator has turned it off. If yours shows 1, switch it back on with fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0 — no restart needed.

Method 5: Read Windows' Own Disk Log

Windows keeps a log of disk errors that most people never look at. Open Event Viewer, go to Windows Logs, then System, and look for the source disk. Event 7 says the drive has a bad block. Event 153 says a read or write had to be retried. A few of these in the log alongside slowdowns and freezes is a much stronger warning than slowness on its own — a slow PC by itself is rarely a failing drive.

What the Windows Critical Warnings Mean

Windows 11 does not wait for you to open Settings. When it detects a problem with an NVMe SSD, it sends a notification about a storage device that may be at risk of failure. Selecting the notification takes you straight to the drive's Properties page. There are three types of critical warning. Spare capacity is low means the spare storage has dropped below the manufacturer's safety threshold. Reliability is degraded means the drive has logged significant media-related errors or an internal error. Drive is set to read-only means you can still open your data, but you cannot write anything new to the drive. Microsoft strongly recommends paying attention to the message and backing up your data. Treat it as the last warning you are going to get.

How to Check SSD Health on Mac

On a Mac, open the Apple menu, choose About This Mac, then More Info, then System Report, and look under Storage or NVMExpress. The SMART Status line is the verdict: it should say Verified. If it says anything else — Failing, for example — back up immediately and plan a replacement.

Two warnings apply on Macs. First, Disk Utility's First Aid is a repair tool that writes to the drive, so do not use it as a health check on a drive you are already worried about. Second, on many newer laptops, including recent MacBooks and Surface devices, the SSD is soldered to the logic board and the data is encrypted by the computer's own security chip. If one of those machines shows failure signs, the drive cannot simply be pulled out and copied elsewhere — which makes backing up early even more important.

NVMe vs SATA: Why the Drive Health Page May Be Missing

The single most common confusion in SSD health checks is the missing Drive health section. It is not a bug, and it does not mean your drive is broken. Windows only shows that section for NVMe drives. The table below shows which check works for which drive.

If your drive is SATA, the PowerShell commands are your main check — and because there is no automatic warning for SATA drives, it is worth running them a little more often than you would for an NVMe drive. A free tool like CrystalDiskInfo reads each drive's full SMART record and sums it up as Good, Caution, or Bad, which is useful when PowerShell leaves a counter blank. The drive maker's own utility shows the same values in plain language and can also update the drive's firmware — but never run a firmware update on a drive that is already misbehaving.

What Do the SSD Health Numbers Mean?

The numbers look technical, but each one answers a plain question. The table below translates them, and the worked example underneath shows why wear alone is rarely what kills a drive.

A low remaining-life figure does not automatically mean the drive is about to die. Microsoft notes that the figure is based on the manufacturer's prediction, and using up the estimated life does not automatically mean the drive will fail. Many drives run well past 100 percent wear, though they grow slower at writing and eventually switch to read-only. Treat a low number as a reason to keep a fresh backup and start budgeting for a new drive — not as a countdown.

Here is the wear arithmetic, worked out so you can run it for your own drive. Every SSD is rated to absorb a certain amount of writing over its life, usually expressed as terabytes written (TBW). Take an illustrative drive rated at 600 TBW. If you write 50 GB to it on a typical day, the math is 600,000 GB divided by 50 GB per day, which is 12,000 days — about 33 years. Even at 200 GB a day, the same drive lasts about 8 years on wear alone. That is why data-recovery engineers say the most common SSD failures they see are firmware and mapping-table problems, not worn-out flash — wear is gradual and shows up in the SMART values first, while sudden death is almost always a firmware, controller, or power problem.

How to Tell If Your SSD Is Failing

SSD failure signs fall into two groups, and deciding which group you are in is the single most useful thing you can do. The first group means back up today while the drive still works. The second means stop powering it on, because every start-up can make recovery harder.

Just as important is what is not a sign of failure. Clicking, grinding, or buzzing cannot come from an SSD — it has no moving parts, so that noise is coming from a hard drive or a fan. Slowness alone is rarely a failure sign: a nearly full SSD, a heavy background update, or thermal throttling can all slow things down without anything being wrong with the drive. Age alone is not a sign either — SSDs do not wear out by sitting in a computer, because wear comes from writing data. A five-year-old drive that has seen light use can be in better shape than a one-year-old drive that has handled constant video work.

What Not to Do to a Drive You Suspect Is Failing

The wrong "fix" can turn a recoverable problem into an unrecoverable one. Do not run chkdsk with the /f or /r flags, do not run "optimize" or "repair" functions, and do not update the firmware on a drive that is already misbehaving. On a healthy drive these are routine. On a failing one they put extra load on a struggling controller or write to the very structures a recovery depends on.

Do not run repeated full-surface scans, and do not run any tool that offers to fix errors. If files were deleted or the drive was reformatted, do not run recovery software on it — TRIM is actively erasing the deleted blocks in the background, and every minute the drive stays powered gives the controller more time to erase. Power it off immediately. And do not keep rebooting to see if the drive comes back: each power cycle on a failing controller is another chance for it to get worse.

What to Do When the Numbers Look Bad

If you see a critical warning, a HealthStatus other than Healthy, or uncorrected errors piling up, follow this order. First, back up. Copy your important files to an external drive or cloud storage before you troubleshoot anything. Second, go easy on the drive — hold off on large downloads and game installs until your data is safe. Third, check the warranty with your PC maker or the SSD manufacturer. Fourth, plan the replacement. A drive that is set to read-only still lets you read your files, so copy them off without delay.

When you do replace the drive, install Windows fresh on the new drive rather than cloning the failing one — cloning copies whatever the failing drive has already corrupted. Cloning a drive that is only worn, with no errors, is fine. If temperature is the only red flag, compare it with TemperatureMax and check that the vents are clear. An NVMe SSD above about 70 °C slows itself down when hot, which looks like a large copy that starts quickly and then collapses — easy to mistake for a failing drive when it is only a hot one. Fitting the heatsink that came with the drive or motherboard, moving the drive out from directly under the graphics card, and improving case airflow all help.

One last check, because it is the cheapest fix in this whole guide: a nearly full drive can also look sick. If your SSD is almost out of room, free up disk space on Windows 11 before you blame the hardware. And if the whole PC feels slow rather than the drive specifically, speed up a slow laptop covers the far more common causes. If you want the full hardware-health picture, check how much RAM you have and check your CPU temperature — the three checks together tell you whether the drive, the memory, or the heat is the real problem.

Sources

• Gillware — "Signs of SSD Failure: When to Back Up and When to Stop" (gillware.com/ssd-data-recovery-service/signs-of-ssd-failure/, updated October 2026) — controller and mapping-table failure modes, back-up-now vs stop powering it on groups, SMART fields that matter (Available Spare, Percentage Used, Media and Data Integrity Errors, Critical Warning), TRIM erasing deleted blocks within minutes, soldered-SSD warning, myths (clicking, slowness alone, age alone).
• 360-Reader — "How to Check SSD Health in Windows 11 Without Extra Tools" (360-reader.com/check-ssd-health-windows-11/, published October 8, 2026) — Settings Drive health page for NVMe only, the three attributes (estimated remaining life, available spare, temperature), the three critical warnings, Get-PhysicalDisk and Get-StorageReliabilityCounter commands, Wear at 100 percent, TRIM check with fsutil DisableDeleteNotify, optimize and retrim, check every few months.
• Bottleneck — "How to check SSD and hard drive health in Windows" (bottleneckonline.com/guides/check-drive-health.html, updated September 26, 2026) — Event Viewer disk errors (event 7 bad block, event 153 retried read/write), CrystalDiskInfo Good/Caution/Bad, maker utilities (Samsung Magician, WD Dashboard, Crucial Storage Executive), wear above about 80 percent, NVMe above about 70 °C throttling, fresh install vs cloning a failing drive, cooling fixes.
• Auslogics — "How to Check SSD Health On Windows" (auslogics.com/en/articles/how-to-check-ssd-health-a-guide-for-windows-10-and-windows-11-users/) — WMIC diskdrive get status returning OK or Pred Fail, PowerShell Get-PhysicalDisk health columns.

Frequently asked questions

How do I check my SSD health on Windows 11?

Open Settings, go to System, then Storage, then Advanced storage settings, then Disks & volumes, and open the drive's Properties. NVMe drives show a Drive health section with estimated remaining life, available spare, and temperature. For SATA drives, use PowerShell instead: run Get-PhysicalDisk to see HealthStatus, and Get-StorageReliabilityCounter to see wear, temperature, and uncorrected errors.

How do I check SSD health on a Mac?

Open the Apple menu, choose About This Mac, then More Info, then System Report, and look under Storage or NVMExpress. The SMART Status line is the verdict — it should say Verified. If it says anything else, back up immediately. Do not use Disk Utility's First Aid as a health check on a drive you are worried about, because it is a repair tool that writes to the drive.

Does a low remaining life mean my SSD is about to die?

Not necessarily. Microsoft notes that the figure is based on the manufacturer's prediction, and using up the estimated life does not automatically mean the drive will fail. Many drives run well past 100 percent wear. Treat a low number as a reason to keep a fresh backup and start budgeting for a new SSD, not as a countdown to a specific date.

Why is the Drive health section missing on my PC?

Windows 11 shows the Drive health section for NVMe SSDs only. If your drive is a SATA SSD or a hard disk, the section does not appear — that is normal, not a fault. Use the PowerShell commands instead: Get-PhysicalDisk works on any drive, and Get-StorageReliabilityCounter shows the wear and error counters when the drive reports them.

Can an SSD fail without any warning?

Yes. Many SSD failures are sudden, caused by a firmware fault, a controller problem, or a power event, with no warning at all — unlike hard drives, which usually click, grind, or slow down for weeks first. That is why backups matter more with SSDs, not less. A quick health check every few months catches the gradual problems, but only a current backup protects you from the sudden ones.