SerpApi.Org
I've had some pretty good luck with my SSDs. I own several now, and have owned a bunch more over the years, and for the most part, they've all lived long, happy (I guess) lives. But I know that an SSD can fail even at 100% health, so it's no wonder that one of mine died after hitting the 10-year-mark. I've also seen a couple die well before that, and one SSD that was pretty much brand new (or so I was told) nearly ruined an entire PC for me.
But, I digress. Thinking back to my aged SSD that finally kicked the bucket, there have definitely been signs, most of which I've ignored. Here are some of the signs of a dying SSD so that you can be spared the hassle and the data loss.
My PC started freezing for a few seconds at a time
It's easy to blame this on something else
In retrospect, this is where I should've heard those alarm bells start to ring. And I did, and I did a lot of PC troubleshooting, but the SSD seemed so healthy ... so I trusted it. But thinking back, this is where things went south for my poor, old, aging drive.
My PC would freeze for a few seconds at a time, usually when I was opening something, switching between apps, waking the PC from sleep (this even caused some BSODs), or doing anything that touched the boot drive. The mouse might still move, but Windows itself would feel like it had briefly forgotten what it was meant to be doing.
The problem is that this kind of freezing has about a million possible explanations, which is where I wasted my energy trying to fix it. It could be Windows being Windows, a bad driver, a Windows update, RAM issues, or just about anything. Turns out it was always the SSD.
Booting and logging in became weirdly inconsistent
Basic stuff shouldn't be a problem
It's not that my PC simply took longer to boot. That'd be annoying, but not necessarily strange with an old SSD. What stood out in hindsight was how inconsistent it became. Sometimes it'd boot normally, and sometimes I'd get a long black screen, delayed startup apps, and freezes.
The SSD is involved in everything during startup, so it's no wonder. If it's acting up, the entire process will be doing just as poorly.
Games and apps were slow to open
Could be something else, could be the SSD
This got annoying super quickly. Long loading screens, slow browser tabs, and basically, software that used to be so fast was suddenly slow. In games, it's very easy to blame something else, such as the GPU, which is what I did -- this was on an old PC that really just needed a total makeover. My gaming performance was shot, and I blamed everything but the SSD.
None of that screamed "drive failure" on its own, but it became suspicious when it started happening across unrelated apps. App launches depend on a lot of smaller reads, scattered files, cache, libraries, and so on. If all of that on the same SSD starts feeling slightly worse at the same time, that's a reason to look at the drive.
Copying files went downhill real quick
It started fast, but slowed down to a crawl
Copying files was where the drive finally started looking suspicious to me. Transfers would begin at a normal-looking speed and then fall off a cliff. Sometimes that's completely expected, because many SSDs write very quickly at first and then slow down once their cache fills up.
The warning sign is when the slowdown feels pretty extreme or is paired with pauses, or if it's simply new. If your SSD was perfect a week ago but is suddenly acting up, it's time to inspect its SMART health, which is what I did next.
SMART health was not as clean as I assumed
I checked, but I also waved some things away
I did check the drive's health. The mistake was treating SMART health like the end-all, be-all of SSD lifespan. Tools like CrystalDiskInfo are super useful and show information that you should be keeping tabs on, but it's very tempting to just see your SSD health rated as "Good" and leave it there. That's what I did, hoping against hope that that old drive was fine.
The better clues are often hiding in the details. Power-on hours, total host writes, unsafe shutdowns, media errors, available spare, bad blocks, temperature history, and anything that appears to be getting worse over time. SMART data is helpful, but it's not magic, and a drive can look fine even though it's not.
The SSD had very little space for a long time
Not a symptom, but a warning sign
My poor old SSD had a lot to deal with over its entire run, and one thing that can contribute to poor SSD performance and shorten its lifespan is filling it up to full. My boot SSD had spent too much time with too little breathing room, and that's never ideal, especially not in a boot drive.
A nearly full SSD can feel worse in daily use because Windows updates, app installs, caches, temporary files, and background maintenance all have less space to work with. SSDs also need spare room for wear leveling and general housekeeping, even if some of that is hidden from the user.
I avoided the worst of disasters
I got lucky in this whole disaster, in that I didn't really lose any important files. I always back up my data, and that's the part I care about most, because replacing an SSD is annoying, but losing years of files is a completely different kind of pain. I avoided that.
If you, like me, have an SSD that's well past its prime and it seems to be misbehaving, it might be time to cut the cord and let it go. Don't wait until data loss becomes a real possibility; back up your files and look for a replacement instead.
