How to Check SSD Health on Windows: Wear Level, Errors, and the Numbers That Matter

Guide · 9 min read

An SSD gives you almost none of the warnings a spinning drive used to. Older hard drives often announced trouble — new clicking, grinding, a change in how loud the machine sounded — and that audible decline was a genuine, if crude, early-warning system. An SSD has no moving parts and stays silent to the end, which is exactly why checking its health in software matters: the numbers are the only warning you are going to get (experience note rendered in this site's voice; see the SMART basics guide for background). This guide checks an SSD three ways — Windows' built-in commands, the reliability counters behind them, and what the results mean — in a numbered procedure a non-technical reader can follow. It applies to internal SSDs on Windows 10 and 11.

What "health" means for an SSD

SSD wear is real but specific: flash cells tolerate a finite number of writes, and the drive tracks its own consumption of that budget. The headline figure is a wear or "percentage used" value — 0% on a young drive, climbing over years of use. Supporting figures matter alongside it: power-on hours, read and write error totals, and temperature, current and maximum (Digital Trends; Bit Guardian). A sensible reading combines them. High wear with zero errors is an old drive ageing normally. Low wear with rising error counts is a younger drive in trouble. One number, alone, is a headline without the article.

Method 1: the two-minute built-in check

Open the Start menu, type PowerShell, right-click Windows PowerShell, and choose Run as administrator.
Type Get-PhysicalDisk and press Enter.
Read the HealthStatus column for your SSD: Healthy, Warning, or Unhealthy (Digital Trends).
Note the OperationalStatus as well — it should read OK; anything else points at connection or device problems rather than wear.

An older command you will see in many guides, wmic diskdrive get status, returns a simple OK or Pred Fail per drive — but be aware that Microsoft removed WMIC from Windows 11 starting with version 25H2, so on a current machine the command may simply not exist (TweakTown). The PowerShell route above is the durable one. Know its limit, though: both built-in checks are essentially pass/fail indicators. As TweakTown's guide puts it, Windows' native tools are useful for a quick glance, not for understanding what is happening inside the drive — which is what Method 2 is for.

Method 2: the reliability counters (the numbers that matter)

In the same administrator PowerShell window, run: Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter | Format-List
Read the fields that matter: Wear (percentage of rated life used), PowerOnHours, ReadErrorsTotal and WriteErrorsTotal, and Temperature with TemperatureMax (Digital Trends; Bit Guardian).
Write the values down with today's date. A single reading is a snapshot; the same numbers recorded quarterly are a trend, and trends are what predict trouble.
If the counters come back empty — some drives and controllers do not expose them to Windows — use the drive manufacturer's own toolbox software, or a SMART reader, instead (Digital Trends notes this fallback). This site's guide to free health-check tools covers those options.

Reading	Calm interpretation	Act-now interpretation
HealthStatus	Healthy	Warning or Unhealthy: back up first, diagnose second
Wear	Climbing slowly over years, errors at zero	Wear high and errors appearing — plan the replacement
Read/Write errors	Zero, or a small count that never changes between checks	A count that grows between checks, however small the numbers
Temperature	Settles back down after heavy work	Persistently hot: one how-to source flags below 70°C as the safe working range and advises cooling fixes above it (Bit Guardian)

What to do with each verdict

Healthy, low wear: record the numbers, set a reminder to re-check in three months, and confirm your backups exist — a healthy SSD is not a backup strategy, it is one copy with good manners. Warning, or wear climbing with errors: back up the irreplaceable data today, before any further testing; then plan a replacement on your schedule instead of the drive's. Unhealthy or Pred Fail: treat the drive as already borrowed time. Copy data off in priority order — documents and photos first, bulk media last — avoid heavy write workloads like full-disk scans that spend the drive's remaining life, and do not install the new operating system onto it "to test". In all three cases the order of operations is identical: data first, diagnosis second, replacement third.

Why the manufacturer's toolbox still earns its place

Windows' counters answer "is this drive reporting trouble?" — the drive maker's own software answers two further questions. First, firmware: toolbox software checks whether the drive's firmware is current and applies updates, and outdated firmware is a documented cause of drives misreporting health or misbehaving under load. Second, interpretation: SMART attributes are not labelled identically across brands — one maker's wear attribute naming differs from another's, which makes raw third-party readings easy to misread (TweakTown). The manufacturer's tool translates its own drive's attributes into a plain health percentage with no guesswork. The practical routine is therefore layered: PowerShell counters quarterly for the trend, the manufacturer's toolbox once or twice a year — or immediately, the first time the Windows numbers look odd. Neither layer requires the other, but a drive whose two toolsets agree is a drive you can make decisions about, and a drive where they disagree has just told you which reading to investigate before trusting either.

Keep the record where you will find it

Store the dated readings with the machine's other documents — a single text file named for the computer, appended each quarter, is enough. When a drive eventually does decline, that file becomes the evidence that turns a vague worry into a decision: wear that took three years to reach 20% and one quarter to reach 35% is a drive announcing a change of behaviour, and it is a far stronger basis for an immediate replacement than any single alarming number read in isolation.

FAQ

Does checking health wear the SSD out? No. These commands read counters the drive already maintains; the read itself is negligible. What wears an SSD is writing data, which is why heavy benchmarking on a suspect drive is a poor idea and light counter-reading is a good one.

My wear says 12% after two years. Is that bad? On its own, no — it is a budget being spent at a pace you can project: at the same pace the drive's rated write life lasts many more years. Wear becomes a story when errors join it or when the pace suddenly accelerates.

Windows says Healthy but the machine is misbehaving. Health status covers the drive's self-reported condition, not the whole machine: file-system errors, a failing cable, and software problems all live elsewhere. Run the file-system check in this site's CHKDSK guide after you have a backup.

What success looks like: you finish with three things written down — HealthStatus, Wear, and the error totals, dated today — a backup you have verified exists, and a calendar reminder to repeat the check. That small ritual is the SSD equivalent of listening to your old hard drive, and it is the only one you will get.

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