Nobody likes running into a failed hard drive, especially when it is your system drive. Thankfully, hard drives usually have a decent lifespan to them before you start running into issues. Many failures can be predicted as well thanks to all of the moving parts of a drive and the noises a failing drive can make.
However, NVMe SSDs (solid-state drives) don’t have this luxury. Not only do they not make any noise during use, but they have a set number of data written before they are no longer of any use (how many times terabytes they can write within a lifetime). This can make it difficult to diagnose a failing drive. If you are smart about it, you’ll likely have scheduled backups already in motion. Windows 10 even has a backup feature built into the settings screen to help protect your files. Of course not everyone is quick to follow through with such tasks and find themselves waiting till its too late.
Windows will soon be able to make the whole experience much easier on everyone. It will warn you when it detects the lifespan of an NVMe drive wavering so that you can back it up quickly if you haven’t already been keeping up with the task.
It’s a neat feature that you usually have to make use of a third-party app for (like CrystalDiskInfo). So this is a nice feature to have natively built into Windows.
Right now, it is only available for Windows Insiders (build # 20226), so you will have to wait until it rolls out to the public. With Microsoft, there is no telling when this may be, but there is a chance you may see it by the end of the year (hopefully). In the meantime, you can always check out some of the third-party options as you should always be monitoring the life of your drives. Take no chances when it comes to your data!
1 Comment
This will be awesome to have as long as it consumes less resources than some of the said third-party solutions. Especially if it works better. This has been such an issue with NVMe although it would be even nicer to see a huge improvement on the lifespan of these drives in general. They need to last longer than a normal HDD in order to help justify their cost.