Wondering how you can check the health status of an SSD drive in your Mac? Thanks to a third party app called DriveDX, determining the health of a Mac SSD and other disk drives is easier than ever.
Knowing the health of your disk is important for many reasons, but it may be of particular significance now that most modern Macs have SSD drives soldered into the logic board, which means if the SSD is failing, the entire logic board has to get replaced – a much more expensive repair than simply swapping out a drive. By checking the health status of your SSD, you can potentially get ahead of issues, back up your data, and at least consider your repair options absent a disastrous scenario.
DriveDX offers a free trial, allowing you to see the current health status of your SSD. If you want to continue to use DriveDX past the two week trial, you can pay for it.
Open DriveDX and you’ll get an overview of the drive, including an overall health rating, SMART status, and lifespan indicator.
You can further drill down by choosing the “Health Indicators” option from the left sidebar to reveal other indicators of the drives health, including temperature readings, drive reading and write, power cycles, time on, and more.
Fortunately the soldered in flash memory drives used on modern Macs have a lengthy lifespan, as demonstrated by the screenshots taken for this article, which show a first gen Retina MacBook Air SSD has only used 4% of it’s estimated lifespan according to the Life Percentage Used indicator. Not too bad for nearly 4 years of continuous use!
Regardless of how your SSD is rated in DriveDX, it’s always a good idea to backup your Mac with Time Machine or another backup method. Drives do fail, and sometimes spontaneously. If the drive completely fails and you don’t have a backup, you’re out of luck and all your important data is likely gone for good. A backup offers a way to restore that data, and you’ll be grateful to have if you ever need it.
Do you use DriveDX to check on the health of your Mac SSD or disk drives? Do you use another tool or method to keep an eye on drive health? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments.
