How to check SSD health
Solid-state drives fail differently than spinning disks—monitor wear, temperature under sustained IO, and controller-reported errors.
Wear and TBW sanity
Terabytes written (TBW) ratings describe storage endurance targets—not expiration dates. Compare host writes against warranty thresholds, but prioritize sudden jumps in media errors or unsafe shutdowns over slowly accumulating wear on a large-capacity drive.
Thermal throttling under load
NVMe drives tucked behind GPUs throttle during lengthy sequential writes. Chart temperatures during realistic workloads: video ingest, game patching, or dataset copies—not idle desktop temps alone.
SMART differences vs HDD folklore
Ignore mechanical indicators like seek error rate on pure SSDs—focus on grown defects, remaining spare blocks, and PCIe correctable errors when exposed. When unsure, cross-read storage datasheets for attribute naming quirks.