How to Check SSD Health on Windows 11 (and Across a Fleet)

An SSD rarely gives notice. It runs fine until the morning it doesn't, and the ticket that lands reads "laptop won't boot" with no mention of the drive. Here's how to check SSD health on Windows 11 with what's already installed, what the numbers mean, and how to run the same check across every device you manage.

What SSD Health Means

Every SSD keeps its own scorecard. The controller counts how much of the drive's rated write life is used, how many spare cells are left, how hot it runs, and how many reads it could not correct. NVMe drives keep that scorecard in the SMART / Health Information log, log page 02h in the NVMe specification, and SATA drives keep SMART attributes that mean roughly the same things. Windows reads the log and surfaces it in three places: Settings, PowerShell and the event log.

That is a different question from the one chkdsk answers. Per Microsoft's reference for the command (May 2025), chkdsk checks the file system and its metadata on a volume for logical and physical errors. It can tell you a file table is broken. It cannot tell you the flash is wearing out. Health is the drive's own view of itself; chkdsk is Windows' view of what it wrote there. You need both, and they fail at different times.

Check It in Settings First

Windows 11 shows drive health for NVMe SSDs with nothing extra installed. Open Settings, then System, then Storage, then Advanced storage settings, then Disks & volumes. Pick the drive and open Properties. The Drive health section lists estimated remaining life, available spare and temperature. Microsoft added this in 2020 to detect hardware abnormalities on NVMe SSDs and notify users with enough time to act, and the advice in the same announcement still holds: back up as soon as the notification appears (Windows Insider blog, 30 September 2020).

Two limits. The page covers NVMe only, so a SATA SSD shows no Drive health section at all. And a drive in a USB enclosure usually reports nothing either, because the bridge chip between the drive and Windows rarely passes the health log through. Both cases need PowerShell or a vendor tool.

Tropical Tech's short walkthrough shows the Settings page and the Properties screen on a Windows 11 laptop.

Read It in PowerShell

Open PowerShell as an administrator. Two cmdlets do the work, and both are in Windows already.

powershell
Get-PhysicalDisk | Select-Object FriendlyName, MediaType, BusType, HealthStatus, OperationalStatus

HealthStatus is Windows' summary of the drive. Microsoft's MSFT_PhysicalDisk reference defines four values: Healthy, Warning, Unhealthy and Unknown. Warning means the drive is reporting a problem it has not failed on yet. Unhealthy means it has. OperationalStatus adds the reason, so read the two together.

powershell
Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter |
  Select-Object DeviceId, Wear, Temperature, TemperatureMax, PowerOnHours, ReadErrorsUncorrected, WriteErrorsUncorrected

Get-StorageReliabilityCounter returns the counters behind that summary: temperature, errors, wear and how long the device has been powered on, per Microsoft Learn. Wear is the one to watch. It is a percentage, and at 100 the drive has reached its estimated wear limit (MSFT_StorageReliabilityCounter reference). Uncorrected read or write errors above zero mean the drive has already handed back data it could not fix.

Older guides reach for wmic diskdrive get status. WMIC is no longer in Windows 11 24H2, so use the CIM class it was wrapping instead: Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictStatus returns a yes or no failure prediction per drive. If you keep a cheat sheet of useful PowerShell commands, these three lines belong on it.

What the Numbers Mean

Five counters tell most of the story, whichever tool shows them.

Percentage used is the drive's estimate of consumed write endurance. The NVMe log lets it pass 100; the drive keeps working, but the manufacturer no longer vouches for it, and warranties are written against the same figure. Windows reports it as Wear.

Available spare is the pool of reserve cells the controller swaps in when a block fails. The log carries a spare threshold next to it, and when the spare count drops below that threshold the drive raises its critical warning bit. That is the signal behind the Settings notification.

Temperature is read against the drive's own ceiling. TemperatureMax in the reliability counters is the highest temperature at which the device can still operate normally, so compare the two rather than guessing at a safe number. A drive that sits near its ceiling every afternoon has an airflow problem before it has a drive problem.

Media and data integrity errors count the reads and writes the drive could not complete correctly. Zero is the only good number. Unsafe shutdowns count power losses; a high number on a desktop points at the power supply or the user, not the flash.

A drive can show Healthy and still feel slow. A nearly full drive, a cache that filled during a large copy, or thermal throttling all cut speed without touching a health counter. Rule those out before you blame the drive, and if the slowness comes with blue screens, our guide to the blue screen of death covers reading the stop code first.

When Windows Shows Nothing

Three cases leave the Windows views empty or thin. SATA SSDs skip the Settings page. USB enclosures hide the log behind a bridge chip. RAID controllers present a virtual disk, so Windows sees one healthy volume while a member drive dies underneath it.

For the first two, the drive maker's utility reads everything the drive exposes, including vendor attributes Windows ignores, and usually handles firmware updates too. Samsung Magician, WD Dashboard, Crucial Storage Executive and Kingston SSD Manager each cover their own drives. For a mixed estate, CrystalDiskInfo reads SMART from any brand, and smartctl from the smartmontools project does the same from a script and can talk through many USB bridges. For RAID, go to the controller: iDRAC, iLO or the card's own management tool is the only place the member drives report.

An r/sysadmin thread asked what to run on end-user PCs to catch failing SSDs early. The replies land where this post does: set the RMM to alert on SMART thresholds, expect a warning for write exhaustion and little else, and keep the backup current because some SSDs die with no warning at all.

Check a Whole Fleet

The one-PC check scales because the two cmdlets run anywhere. The script below collects one row per SSD, so your RMM or a scheduled job can gather the rows and sort by wear.

powershell
$rows = foreach ($d in Get-PhysicalDisk | Where-Object MediaType -eq 'SSD') {
  $c = $d | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter
  [pscustomobject]@{
    Host     = $env:COMPUTERNAME
    Model    = $d.FriendlyName
    Serial   = $d.SerialNumber
    Bus      = $d.BusType
    Health   = $d.HealthStatus
    Wear     = $c.Wear
    TempC    = $c.Temperature
    TempMax  = $c.TemperatureMax
    Hours    = $c.PowerOnHours
    ReadErr  = $c.ReadErrorsUncorrected
    WriteErr = $c.WriteErrorsUncorrected
  }
}
$rows | ConvertTo-Json -Compress

Four rules turn the rows into tickets. Health anything but Healthy opens one today. Any uncorrected error means back up today and replace this week, because the next error lands in a file someone needs. Wear at 80 or above goes on the replacement list for the quarter, while the drive still boots. Temperature at or within a few degrees of TempMax is an airflow or dust ticket, not a drive ticket. OpenFrame can run this script across a client's devices and collect the output in one place, which is the whole job.

Run it monthly and keep the rows. Wear that moves five points a month is a drive that will not see its warranty out, and a replacement schedule built on wear beats one built on purchase date; our guide to IT asset lifecycle management covers the rest of that spreadsheet.

An r/sysadmin thread from December 2025 shows the counter doing its job. A research group's enterprise SSD read 31 percent life left after four years and about 10 TB written, and the question was what to replace it with. The replies went to power-loss events, the write cliff on consumer drives, and backups, but the method is the part to copy: the number came from smartctl, and the decision followed the number rather than the purchase date.

What to Do With a Failing Drive

Back up first, before any repair. A drive reporting Warning is still readable today and may not be tomorrow, so the first ten minutes go to copying what matters off it; if the machine has no backup at all, our guide to backup solutions covers what to put in place after this one is over.

Do not run chkdsk /r on a loop. Each pass reads the whole surface of a drive that is already struggling, and it fixes file system damage, not flash. The same goes for the format-and-reinstall reflex: a fresh Windows on a drive with uncorrected errors is a fresh Windows on a dying drive. When a file copy throws an error like the parameter is incorrect, check the hardware first for the same reason.

Then replace. Clone from the old drive only while it still reads cleanly; once errors appear, restore from the backup onto the new drive instead. Check the warranty before you bin it: SSD warranties carry a written endurance rating alongside the years, and a drive that hits its wear limit inside the period is a return, not a loss.

Short Version

Settings shows NVMe health in four clicks. Get-PhysicalDisk gives the summary and Get-StorageReliabilityCounter gives the numbers, on any bus. Wear, spare, temperature against its ceiling, and uncorrected errors are the four to read. Script the check, run it monthly, and replace on wear rather than on age. When a drive says Warning, the backup comes before the repair.

FAQ

How do I check SSD health on Windows 11 without third-party tools?

Open Settings, then System, Storage, Advanced storage settings, Disks & volumes, and the drive's Properties page for NVMe drives. For any drive, run Get-PhysicalDisk for the summary and Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter for wear, temperature and error counts in an elevated PowerShell window.

What does Wear mean in Get-StorageReliabilityCounter?

Wear is the drive's wear indicator as a percentage. At 100 the drive has reached its estimated wear limit, per Microsoft's MSFT_StorageReliabilityCounter reference. It maps to the NVMe percentage-used field, which the drive can report past 100 while it keeps working.

Why does Windows 11 show no drive health for my SSD?

The Settings page only reads NVMe drives connected directly. SATA SSDs and drives in USB enclosures show nothing there. Use the PowerShell cmdlets, which work on any bus Windows can see, or the drive maker's own utility for an external drive.

Does chkdsk check SSD health?

No. chkdsk checks the file system and its metadata on a volume for errors. It does not read the drive's SMART or NVMe health log, so a drive can pass chkdsk while its wear counter sits at 100. Use Get-StorageReliabilityCounter or a SMART reader for the hardware side.