What is SSD and why need to check health?

One of the main components inside a computer is your SSD, which stores your operating system and all your data. You can install it on a computer.

 

There is third-party software. But if you’re suffering from your PC running slower than usual, or if applications are launching slowly or crashing, or maybe you’re getting a blue screen of death, and you’re also getting some sort of SSD flag error code up on the screen,

then this is a central place to check to see whether your drive is failing or whether it has gone bad. So you can see here that this software is for Western Digital drives. I’ve got it installed. It’s a very nice-looking piece of software, but it’s more than just nice looking. It gives you very useful information about the model, the firmware version, the drive’s health and security, whether it’s frozen or working normally, or this sort of useful information.

It gives you the temperatures and also the capacity that is available on that drive. It will also give you some values, and the lifetime remaining, which is 100%, as you can see down at the bottom here, gives you plenty of useful information here.

Important of temperatures

The temperatures are important. So if you’re running one of these super fast drives, they can get super hot, so it’s important that you have good cooling on the lifetime remaining on this ride because it’s a brand new drive. It’s 100% You can also see the Inter. Speeds, which is Gen 4.

and you can also see some other useful information up here. So let’s go to the performance tab here, and you can see the transfer speeds on here as well, and you’ll be able to have a good monitor on here because this is a live monitor that shows you exactly what is actually happening to your SSD as we’re speaking right now. There’s also a trim in here. If your actual NVME supports it, you can enable this feature.

Help free up space that is used by files that have since been deleted. So It clears off all of that junk and all of the remnants left behind on that drive.and you can have this run in as a scheduled task if you wish, and I would recommend you do that weekly and just have this run-in, and it will run on your system and clean all of the free space and all the other rubbish that’s left behind on that drive, and you can run this as a scheduled task here. All drives are going to have trim capability. So just keep that in mind, and if you’re using one of these cheaper Chinese branded drives, you might not have software to use like this because some of them don’t have software. so you won’t be able to use that feature.

There’s a gaming mode up here that you can turn on if you wish, and you can see the gaming mode in the drive performance, so we might as well turn that on as well, and you will need to restart the system, but I’ll restart that later on, and that is the gaming mode now enabled, and you can also run some other things on here, like smart tests and things like that, to check the drive even further if you want to run a quick check on the drive.

Clear out all the temporary files.

. Now, it is very important, uh, that you keep monitoring your drive because when SSDs let go, they will just die, and that will be It’s so important that you keep an eye on it as part of your maintenance. When you’re going to clear out all the temporary files and check in on your driver, make sure you just run some little basic checks on your system to make sure everything is running smoothly and everything is up to date. You can update the firmware here by checking for firmware updates. This is important because it fixes any bugs or anything like that. And we also have a smart diagnostic short test, a smart diagnostic extended test, and a smart data readout as well. 08:09 AM

 

This is useful if you are having issues, uh, whether you’re having crashes, blue screens, or applications slowly opening or crashing, or you are having some sort of slowdown on your PC. You can check to see whether your drive is failing. If it is, then it will tell you that by running this smart diagnostic, uh, testing, you can run a short test first, and then you can also run an extended test. If you are having some sort of major issue, it is well advised that you back up your data immediately. If you’re having serious problems before you start running any exhaustive tests on that drive, you want to get the data off just in case the drive is failing. Now. I also have another drive on here called a crucial, uh, drive.

which I used in my store. It’s a 4 terabyte drive, and it’s a P3, and I have it installed on this system now; unfortunately, the Western Digital software won’t read that drive. So you will need to go to the manufacturer’s website and download their software. So now we have two different programs on the computer, and you will need to install them, which will take care of the crucial side of things for their hardware. And once you open this up, it will be pretty much the same sort of thing. I found this a little bit more sluggish and slow compared to the Western Digital software, and this is it right here.

It will just give you a breakdown of exactly what your drive is, and as you can see, it also detects my Western Digital Drive there, so it does actually detect both drives. We have all the same functionality: system information, drive details, smart read-out, and further updates to sanitize the drive format. And there are also a lot of other features on here, just like we did with the other software, and you can do all the same stuff here, which will help you understand your reads and writes. And also, if you want to erase and sanitize the drive, you can deal with both of these programs. You’ll be able to To download the uh driver here, you’ll need the driver installed for this particular version of the drive. And once you’ve got that installed, you’ll be able to sanitize the drive and erase all the data on it.

Reinstall Windows without any issues.

And reinstall Windows, and maybe if you’re selling a computer or giving the computer away, you’re giving them the drive as well. It’s always best to remove any sort of data from that drive. And this is the sort of way you’re going to sanitize that drive. Okay, now I see so many people installing an SSD MV drive on their system, and they don’t even put the software on because they don’t even know it exists.

They don’t make a big song and dance about publicizing the software, but it is useful and can tell you the health of your drive. Now there is third-party software that you can use, and I want to go through and show you some of these because some of the cheaper drives out there on the market don’t have software with them. And again, if you don’t have the software, that means you can’t check the drive or look at the statistics of that drive, check the health of that drive, and also check the lifespan of that drive by checking the terabytes written on that drive. Now you can use something like a Crystal disk, and this will give you a good readout of the statistics of the drive. You can see they’ll give us some health status temperatures, and it will also tell us the power on count, the power on hours, and also rotation.

Rate and also a load of other information like total host reads and total host writes. This is the amount of work that has been done on that drive. And this will sort of give you a rough idea of what that driver has gone through and what sort of life expectancy that will have. You can check the manufacturer’s website to find out how many terabytes can be written to that right before it starts to fail, but it will show signs here that the driver is starting to wear and tear by looking at the health status. So if you’re one of these people who really abused your hard drive by writing loads of terabytes to it,.08:09 AM

Then you’re not going to have that drive for very long. If it’s one of those cheaper drives, that’s why it’s important to use a good quality drive.

It can also find out whether the driver’s in good working order in your command prompt by typing in a few simple commands.

in this simple command, and it will tell you whether the driver is okay or not. If it says okay, then the driver is working. Okay. It’s very basic, but it does tell you roughly that the drive is functioning perfectly fine. If you get any other information on there, other than that, you’ll know the driver is stuck to foul now. There’s also some other useful software, which is from C Tools, and you can download it. This will give you a lot of information about your system.

bootable drive for Windows or Linux

Whether you’re running on Windows or Linux or you want to use it as a bootable drive, you can do so and boot to that, and this is the actual software here. And this should read that some of these unbranded type drives, which I call unbranded, come from China, and it sometimes says unknown for these types of drives, but sometimes you might be lucky and get some information. You can see it here. We’re getting some useful information.

Like how much free the lifespan of that drive is and also the terabytes written to that drive, this will give you a rough idea. So when the manufacturer says it has 50 million terabytes written to that drive capability, you can see we’ve only done 1 terabyte down there and 467 gigabytes on the other drive. You can also run a quick test here and get some drive details. If you wish, just like you could in the manufacturer’s software,

The SeaTools tool will give you a lot of detailed information about the drive’s health and performance.

The SeaTools tool allows you to check for any potential issues with the drive, such as bad sectors or an overall lifespan.

SeaTools, and it will work with all of your drives, which is quite useful. So if you’ve got a suspicion that your drive is starting to fail, or something is wrong with the drive, or maybe you just want to test it, You can run some quick tests to see if they’re still showing up.

You can run a more extensive, uh, test here and do a longer, shorter test if you want to. There’s also some fixes here, both long and short, and we also have some advanced information here that will give you the serial number and also the firmware of that drive.

Maybe there might be a firmware update for that drive that will resolve a lot of these issues that you might be having. Maybe it’s outdated or something like that, and there is a firmware release that will fix the bug that you may be having.

You also have some erase utilities here and some other utilities that you can download for free. This is the C Tools version, which is made by Seagate, and it’s a free tool that you can download for all drives.

Download link https://www.seagate.com/in/en/support/downloads/seatools/