Often, it’s not easy to tell if your hard drive or SSD is about to fail. This is especially true for the latter, which can show no symptoms before suddenly failing, taking all your data with it. But soon, Windows 10 will tell you if it detects that your SSD is approaching the end of its life.
Microsoft made the announcement via the Windows Insider Blog that the feature will be making its way to the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20226. That being said, the use of this feature may be limited to NVMe SSDs only. The blog entry says that the feature is “designed to detect hardware abnormalities for NVMe SSDs and notify users with enough time to act”.
If NVMe SSD failure is imminent, you’ll see a pop up notification that says “A storage device may be at risk of failure and requires your attention”. That’s your que to drop everything else and make a backup of your drive. The pop up itself can be clicked to start the process immediately.
You can also manually check your drive’s health by going to (Settings -> System -> Storage -> Manage disks and volumes -> Properties). Here you’ll see the estimated remaining life of your drive written in percentage points. And if failure is imminent, you’ll see a red warning line here as well.
No doubt this is a very useful feature to have on Windows 10. Though it’s a little unfortunate that it only applies to NVMe SSDs. I know I would’ve appreciated something like this for SATA SSDs just two years ago.
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