Storage media of all kinds are consumable. In short, one day it will fail. To always stay one step ahead, there are many ways to check the status of your SSD on Mac. Here we will show you how to check the status of your SSD on your Mac and also take a quick look at some third-party tools to help you.
What Is Disk Health?
Rotating hard drives sometimes have an error curve. When you first receive a hard drive, there is a high probability of failure thanks to so-called Dead On Arrival (DOA) drives. If the unit starts properly, it will likely take years for a wear failure.
In other words, the probability of failure is high at the beginning and end of the life of a converter (eg bathtub walls). In the middle (that is, at the bottom of the tub), on the other hand, there is a relatively low failure rate.
On the other hand, SSDs show a different failure curve. They still have the same high early failure rates. However, the flash memory used in SSDs can only survive a certain number of write cycles. If you reach the limit, you will suffer a catastrophic failure and data recovery will not be possible. Therefore, it is worth keeping an eye on the status of a drive that could fail without warning.
You can predict and plan for both types of failures using certain characteristic failure patterns. Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) is an automated self-test system for more traditional SSDs and HDDs. This helps macOS track the SMART status of all your drives by default, and there are several tools that read this status at different levels of detail.
Check Your SSD Health Using SMART Status System Reports
The process of checking the status of the SSDs on your Mac is straightforward and takes about a minute.
1. Click the Apple icon in the upper left corner (on the toolbar), then hold down the Option key. You will see that “About this Mac” changes to “System Information”.
2. When the screen opens, find the storage area in the tree directory on the left in the Hardware section:
3. Then select the drive you want to examine from the list on the right.
4. You can find the SMART status at the bottom of the area on the right, often as the last item in the list.
“Verified” in this case means that no problems have been reported for the drive. “Failed” means that the drive has had an error that will soon become “fatal”. SMART’s numerical error code system provides more information on the specific drive disaster, but macOS’s broad title is enough to guess how quickly a drive will fail.
Check Your SSD Health Using smartmontools
With Homebrew installed, you can install smartmontools to check the SSD status on your Mac. This will display the SMART status through the terminal.
1. Open your chosen Terminal and run the following command to install smartmontools with Homebrew:
brew install smartmontools
2. Next, run diskutil list to find the drive identifier for the volume you want to test:
By the way, you can also find the drive label in the system information by looking for the BSD name.
3. Run the following command to get the SMART status of the specified drive:
smartctl -a disk1s2
Note that you want to replace the BSD wildcard name with yours. Separately, this will produce a detailed SMART report to standard output.
If you want to save the SMART report to disk, you can use the > control character to send it to a text file:
smartctl -a disk1s2 > diskhealthreport.txt
This report provides a detailed view of the status of the drive. The most relevant piece of information is the verdict that appears in the middle of the report. The manufacturer-specific SMART status can then provide information about the deepest health of the drive.
Check Your SSD Health with DriveDx
If you are looking for a premium solution to check the status of your SSD on your Mac, DriveDx is a great option.
This is a drive diagnostic tool that provides a detailed picture of the status of your SSD. This application can scan all your connected drives and provide a complete picture of the status of your storage system.
While the application is open, it continuously monitors the SMART status for indications of errors or problems. This is the easiest way to get a detailed picture of the status of your hard drive without going through technical logs.
Related: How to Stop the Spinning Wheel on your Mac
Summary
Casually checking your SSD status for your Mac is a good idea, but shouldn’t be an obsession. . The above methods are a quick way to check the status of your SSD on your Mac.
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