SSDs are beginning to dominate the hard drive market by replacing the roles of HDD in laptops and high-end desktops. SSD hard drives offer high performance at low power dissipation compared to the ordinary hard disks. However, it is important to make sure SSD drive is healthy in order to keep the good performance.

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In this article, you will learn how to check SSD Health on a Windows or Mac computer. There are a number of tools to check SSD health, but in this article, we’ll discuss only the best Windows and Mac Free tools to check SSD Health and Monitor Performance.

1. Storage media of all kinds, SSDs included, is consumable. That mean, eventually, it fails. That’s one reason backups are so important. To keep ahead of the game, macOS offers tools that can check the disk health of your SSD and other attached disks.
2. 4TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro - Next Gallery Image; 4TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro. £1,600.00 All Colors. 8TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro - Previous Gallery Image; 8TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro - Next Gallery Image; 8TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro. £2,800.00 All Colors ††.
3. From 2014 the Apple Mac Mini SSD was a proprietary NVME SSD. The 2019 Mac Mini SSD was soldered onto the motherboard and can not be removed or upgraded. Does the 2014 Mac Mini use a standard M.2 SSD? It is only standard in it's physical size. A standard M.2 drive will not work. Apple has made their drives proprietary.

In case an SSD drive failure has happened to you and caused data loss, it is important to know how to recover deleted files from SSD. Don’t hesitate to get lost files back with file recovery software.

Method #1. How to Check SSD Health Using CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is actually a benchmarking tool for testing the speed of write/read, which is one of the most important indicators of your SSD health. Download the small size package, then install it to your computer. The free app will tell you the current state of your SSD.

CrystalDiskMark will allow you to choose a partition or folder of computer built-in or removable hard disk, then test the read/write speed under simulated conditions, like 4K and sequential. Once the test is done, you can know the SSD health status by comparing the result with advertised speed.

Method #2. How to Check SSD Hard Drive Health Using SSD Life

You can buy a Pro version, or you can use the free version of SSD Life. The Pro Version isn’t very expensive so if you like the free version then you may want to try the full app. Once you’ve downloaded the app, install and run it. It will then tell you how your SSD is doing.

This tool will measure your SSD’s lifespan giving you the opportunity to plan well for your data. With the knowledge of your SSD’s lifespan, you can know when to back up your data before your SSD wears off completely. SSD Life can work with most SSD manufacturers such as Kingston, OCZ, and Apple MacBook Air built-in SSD.

Method #3. How to Check SSD Health Using CrystalDiskInfo

CrystalDiskInfo is another freeware offered by individual developer. It supports a part of USB, INTEL RAID and NVMe, and helps to monitor SSD’s health status and temperature. Once installed, the intuitive interface will show you the health status of your SSD, with a list of parameters, including critical warning, available spare, media and data integrity errors, etc. There are several more interesting functions hidden in the menu.

CrystalDiskInfo has three editions, namely Standard Edition, Shizuku Edition and Kurei Kei Edition, with Japanese anime images as UI background in the latter two versions. There is no more extra difference but for giving users fresh experience.

Method #4. How to Check SSD Health Using Smartmonotools

Smartmonotools is an open-source tool for professional users since the operation will carry out in a CMD window. It offers real time monitoring of SSD Hard Disk with two programs, smartctl andsmartd. The two programs control and monitor computer storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T) system.

Once installed, Smartmonotools will display early warning signs of SSD problems detected by S.M.A.R.T., often giving notice of impending failure while it is still possible to back up the data. It supports ATA/ATAPI/SATA-3 to 8 disks and SCSI disks and tape devices. The tool can run on Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Windows and others.

Method #5. How to Check SSD Health Using Hard Disk Sentinel

HDSentinel, short for Hard Disk Sentinel, supports Windows, Linux and DOS platforms. This SSD monitoring software is built to find, test, diagnose and repair SSD problems. Whether it is an internal or external SSD connected USB or e-SATA, this tool can scan and recognize your SSD health and generate reports with possible fix to solve the errors.

HDSentinel is also able to show you the estimated remaining lifetime and lifetime writes. The pro version provides more functions, like automatic backup.

Method #6. How to Check SSD Health Using Intel SSD Toolbox

The Intel Solid-State Drive Toolbox is a drive management software that allows you to view SSD information, including:

• Model number, capacity and firmware version
• Drive health
• Estimated drive life remaining
• Identify device information
• Optimize the performance of an intel SSD using Trim functionality

Intel SSD Toolbox allows users to check computer system information and SSD status. It also provides system tuner function to optimize the operating system. However, SMART DRIVE and SMART Estimated Life Remaining are available for Intel SSDs only.

To Sum up

SSD helps computer system run faster and unless you’ve used one in your system, it’s hard to explain or truly appreciate how great it is. Fortunately, it will be more affordable and their lifespan will have improved. Nevertheless, if you have SSD, it is always important to keep an eye on its health status. Any one or two of the above free tools are good for home users. It is also important to back up SSD for important data.

Summary :

Are you utilizing SSD now? Do you know your SSD performance? In fact, you can conduct a test via professional SSD testing software. This post will show you top 8 SSD health check tools. You can obtain detailed information about these tools in MiniTool.

As it known to all, SSD is taking the place of HDD with its high performance. Therefore, most people utilize SSD as their operating system drive. In fact, as for SSD VS HDD, SSD has more advantages. Though SSDs are fast and more preferable, they are quite fragile.

Based on that fact, you should run SSD health check tool or optimization programs occasionally. By doing so, you can maximize your SSD’s performance and lifespan.

What Does an SSD Health Check Tool Do

Nowadays, there are many SSD testing programs on the market, and they boast different features for managing SSD. To be specific, what does an SSD health check tool do? Well, for most SSD health check tools, they can be used to test the SSD transfer speed, measure SSD performance, optimize SSD, etc. Some of them even allow you to erase SSD securely.

Given to that fact, you’d better read the software’s description carefully to check if it contains the feature you need.

The following will give you more information about what an SSD health check tool performs.

Check SSD Health

The first thing that an SSD health check tool does is to tell you how healthy your SSD is. Some SSD health check tools will show you the current state of your SSD and give you a health status, such as Crystal Disk Info.

While others such as MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition can detect how many bad sectors on your SSD, which can indicates your SSD condition. In a word, you can check whether your SSD is in good health easily with these tools.

Optimize SSD Performance

Some SSD tools enable you to carry out garbage collection and other parameters, which can improve the performance of the drive.

Most SSD health check tools allow you to optimize or tune your SSD for different demands such as Intel SSD Toolbox, Samsung Magician, etc. However, you may notice that some utilizes may improve the drive’s performance at the cost of losing some storage capacity.

Here is a step by step guide to measure disk performance for you.

Test SSD Speed

One of the basic features of SSD health check tools is SSD/Disk benchmark, which can measure your SSD performance by testing the SSD transfer speed. You will know whether the write/read data given by manufacturer is accurate after testing the speed of your SSD.

Besides, you will have a rough understanding of your SSD performance.

Secure Erase SSD

If an SSD includes sensitive information and needs to be wiped, erasing the data on the drive is a wise operation. The problem lies in that many SSD tools delete data by overwriting a drive for many times, causing accessing storage areas failure. For example, blocks can be marked as bad, or overprovisioning and wear leveling blocks.

While some SSD secure erase tools offer access to a hardware-based secure erase routine. During this process, SSD’s controller ensures that all the storage including the areas that cannot be normally and directly accessed can be cleaned entirely.

There are many SSD health check tools available in the market. Which one should you pick? 8 best SSD testers are introduced in this post. You can take them as your reference.

8 Best SSD Health Check Tools

1. MiniTool Partition Wizard
2. Intel SSD Toolbox
3. Samsung Magician
4. Crystal Disk Info
5. Smartmonotools
6. Hard Disk Sentinel
7. Toshiba SSD Utility
8. SSD Life

Top 8 SSD Health Check Tools

MiniTool Partition Wizard

MiniTool Partition Wizard is a powerful partition manager & SSD health check tool, which can help you format drive, recover missing data, analyze disk usage, migrate OS to SSD/HD, etc. The Disk Benchmark feature enables you to measure disk performance by using variable transfer sizes and test lengths for both sequential and random read/write speeds.

In addition, you can finish the whole operation in a few clicks. With this wonderful SSD benchmark tool, you can test any manufacturer’ RAID controllers, storage controllers, hard drives and SSD drives. However, if the transfer size has a large span, the whole testing process may take you some time.

You can download MiniTool Partition Wizard by clicking the button below.

After downloading and installing MiniTool Partition Wizard, please follow the steps below to perform the disk benchmark operation.

Step 1: Click Launch Application to enter its main interface.

Step 2: Click on Disk Benchmark on the top of the main page.

Step 3: In the pop-up window, you can set HD/SSD disk testing parameters including testing drive, transfer size, queue number, cool down time, thread number, total length, and test mode according to your demand. After that, click on Start to execute the operation.

Step 4: Wait for the completion of operation. Different test settings can take you different time. After the operation finishes, you will get an intuitive table just as the below picture shown.

Just as you see, MiniTool Partition Wizard enables you to perform SSD benchmark with ease. Besides, you can view the results in a direct way. So, please don’t hesitate to download it.

Intel SSD Toolbox

Intel SSD Toolbox is a piece of drive management software that enables you to supervise your drive health, estimate the remaining drive life, as well as S.M.A.R.T. attributes. It can run fast and full diagnostic scans to examine the read and write functionality of an Intel SSD.

Besides, it allows you to update firmware on a supported Intel SSD and improve the performance of an Intel SSD by making using of Trim feature. Then, you are able to obtain the best Intel SSD performance, power efficiency and endurance by checking and adjusting system settings.

With Intel SSD Toolbox, you can perform a secure erase of your secondary Intel SSD. That’s all the features of Intel SSD Toolbox.

Samsung Magician

Compared with Intel SSD Toolbox, Samsung Magician is more complicated. That is because it looks more like a management suite than a simple application. Samsung Magician allows you to create profiles, adjust performance ratings, and set the maximum capacity and reliability.

If you want to avoid any incompatibilities with operating system, you can either to update firmware or download the Magician. Actually, optimization and diagnostics are its basic features. What Samsung Magician offers through its RAID mode is the highlighted point.

Best Mac Ssd Drives

The RAID mode can use 1GB of your system’s DRAM as cache for hot data or frequently-accessed data. In this way, the overall performance, especially the read speed will be improved.

More importantly, if you are not satisfied with the diagnostics results and your benchmarks, you can keep optimizing your Samsung SSD for your present OS through the OS optimization feature in Samsung Magician.

Crystal Disk Info

Ssd Health Status Mac

Crystal Disk Info is a piece of open software that can offer you the health and temperature information of your SSD or HDD. It is one of the free tools that have the capability to collect accurate data for both types of storage drives and work with drives from all manufacturers.

At the same time, general information is also provided for you. Crystal Disk Info allows you to check firmware updates, port details, buffer size, read and write speeds, power consumption and S.M.A.R.T. information. You can test SSD speed through it with ease.

What’s more, you can also use it to do some slight adjustments of power management and notifications. The only disadvantages of Crystal Disk Info are that it won’t work on Linux-based systems and cannot execute firmware updates.

Smartmonotools

The Smartmonotools includes two utility programs (smartctl and smartd), which can help you control and monitor your hard drive. It offers you real time monitoring of your hard disk. What’s more, it will analyze and inform you about possible disk degradation and failure.

Smartmonotools supports ATA/ATAPI/SATA-3 to -8 disks and SCSI disks and type devices. You can run this disk tool on Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2, Cygwin, QNX, eComStation, Windows and a Live CD.

Hard Disk Sentinel

Hard Disk Sentinel is a hard disk monitoring tool that supports Windows, Linux and Dos operating system. It is designed to find, diagnose and repair SSD issues. Disk Sentinel is also able to show you SSD health condition. It can scan either an internal or external SSD connected with USB or e-SATA and find potential issues. After that, it will generate reports with the possible fixes to repair the errors.

After you install Hard Disk Sentinel, it will run in the background and check the SSD health condition automatically. If it finds any error, it will inform you immediately. With this SSD monitoring tool, you can test the hard disk’s transfer speed in real time.

By doing so, you will know your disk benchmark, potential hard disk failures, as well as performance degradations.

Toshiba SSD Utility

If you are using OCZ SSD now, Toshiba SSD Utility is possibly the best software that you can utilize regardless of your operating system. You can monitor your SSD in real time and obtain SSD information including SSD health, remaining life, storage space and overall performance very quickly via using Toshiba SSD Utility.

Additionally, it can also be used as a drive manager and optimization tool. You are able to switch between multiple modes based on your SSD or your rig’s intended use such as gaming, workstation, video editing and so on. By using these preset modes, you can improve the drive’s performance and increase its lifespan in various cases.

SSD Life

SSD Life mainly focuses on SSD health and remaining life instead of other metrics. It has great compatibility with major SSD manufacturers like Apple MacBook Air’s own SSD. It allows you to run diagnostics for SSD health, lifespan and overall performance. SSD Life will tell you accurate results and any important flaws that can influence the remaining lifespan or read/write speeds.

However, the free trial version only lasts seven days and has limitations on some features. After the trial expiration date reaches, you need to pay for it for later-on using.

Conclusion

Now, all the contents about SSD health check tools have been told to you. It’s your turn to make a choice. You can pick one according to your demand. If you pick MiniTool Partition Wizard, you can check SSD health by following the given steps in the post. While for other SSD health check

tools, you should follow the on-screen steps to finish the operation.

If you have any doubt or advice to MiniTool software, please contact us by writing an email directly via [email protected].

SSD Health Check FAQ

There are 5 signs indicate that your SSD is failing.

1. There are errors involving bad blocks.
2. Files cannot be read or written.
3. The file system needs to be repaired.
4. Your computer frequently crashes.
5. Your drive becomes read-only.

If these signs appear, it indicates that your SSD is failing and you need to take some measure.