How to find the wear indicator value for an SSD on Windows 10
If you buy a computer today, the best thing you can invest money in is an SSD or solid state drive. These new drives bring speed to systems that hard drives cannot, and never will be able to. SSDs tend to be more expensive than hard drives and they will eventually fail. You have to keep an eye on your SSD’s health and there are quite a few tools that you can use to do it.
Many of the tools available for checking the health of an SSD will give you a simple diagnosis e.g., your SSD is in good health, or it’s fair, or something else. The tools may or may not be able to give you the actual wear indicator for your drive. If you’re unable to see the wear indicator for your SSD with simple third-party tools, here’s what you can do.
Proprietary SSD managers
When a third-party app fails to read critical information about an SSD, it likely has to do with the manufacturer of the SSD locking it down. Fortunately, most SSD manufacturers provide their own free apps for checking the drive’s health and that is what you should use.
Here are three SSD managers from popular manufacturers. If you have an SSD from a different manufacturer, check their website for available software that can manage it.
The app should be able to show you the wear indicator, and it will be able to give you far more details about the health of your drive than a third-party app could. It’s also a good idea to have the app on your system in any case.
These apps are specific to the SSD you have i.e., the Samsung Magician app won’t be able to do much if you have a Kingston SSD. It may be able to run some tests but they may not be accurate.
We should also warn you that if you attempt to run too strenuous a test on an SSD from a third-party app, you may void your warranty. Be careful and run stress tests only if it’s absolutely necessary.
The health indicators should be more than enough to tell you if your SSD is failing or not and if it is, do not put off replacing it. At the very least, make sure your important data is backed up so that in the event of a disk failure, you don’t lose it.
