25-03-2021

DriveDx will protect you from data loss and downtime

Ssd

From 2014 the Apple Mac Mini SSD was a proprietary NVME SSD. The 2019 Mac Mini SSD was soldered onto the motherboard and can not be removed or upgraded. Does the 2014 Mac Mini use a standard M.2 SSD? It is only standard in it's physical size. A standard M.2 drive will not work. Apple has made their drives proprietary. If you want to keep track of how your SSD is faring health-wise, free utility SSD Health will let you know. Discover the world of SSD Hard Drives for Mac. Compare models and options for the office or home and shop online. 4TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro - Next Gallery Image; 4TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro. £1,600.00 All Colors. 8TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro - Previous Gallery Image; 8TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro - Next Gallery Image; 8TB SSD Kit for Mac Pro. £2,800.00 All Colors ††.

With DriveDx you need not worry about losing your important data, music, and photographs.

You can know before your drive is going to fail, because DriveDx tracks more indicators of impending failure than any other product on the market for both SSDs and HDDs.

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Drive Dashboard

Early Warning System

You will have more chances to save your critical data before any data loss actually occurs.

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Drive Health Indicators

Modern SSDs and HDDs support

When evaluating the state of various drives, DriveDx can use different heuristic algorithms depending on the drive model and even its firmware version.

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Drive Self-tests

Drive Self-tests

Will help to quickly identify if the drive is faulty.

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Drive Self-test in progress

Automatic Email Reports

User does not need to have physical access to a specific computer all the time, which is especially useful for all kinds of server rooms, data centers, etc.

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DriveDx Email Report Preferences
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DriveDx is recommended by
Here's a DriveDx triumph. DriveDx showed my just out of AppleCare iMac with two pre-fail conditions for the hard drive. Made appointment and took it to Genius Bar yesterday. Tech looked at DriveDx and was very impressed. Even though out of warranty - they replaced the drive without question.
God knows how many dollars and troubles DriveDx saved me since I had several vital FinalCut projects on it!
I just registered my copy of DriveDx. I want to say thanks for saving me a whole lot of time, expense, and aggravation. I’m trying to keep my 2011 MPB running for as long as I can….or at least until Apple gets their act together and starts making 17” laptops again. My Samsung 840 EVO SSD is aging, and my laptop gets very heavy work, managing networks, and saving the world.
Lately, the system has been hanging under heavy load. On a whim, I loaded up DriveDx, which told me there were CRC errors on the SATA cable. A $13 cable later, and I am no longer able to crash the system no matter how hard I try. Drive Dx is well worth the $19.99! Thanks a million!
As a photographer, I’m always concerned about drive failure because I know it will happen to all of my drives. What I don’t know is when.DriveDx exposes low-level information of internal sensors, pre-fail indicators and lifetime accumulators of information that have allowed me to anticipate problems before they affect my system. As a result, I sent external drive back to LaCie for exchange under warranty due to anticipated drive failure.
This is one of the best investments you can make in your system. I recommend it highly.
External backup disk will have been gone soon.. It's time for NAS server. Thanks for letting me know @BinaryFruit!
A couple of days ago, DriveDx warned me (pre-failing) for one of my external drives. I don't use it any more for backup. After DriveDx warning, drive behaved abnormally, I heard loud clicking noises and I got warnings from OS X as the drive unmounted abnormally while it was not the case.
Thanks to DriveDx. Best in its class. Excellent tech support.

DriveDx app warned of pending drive failure before it happened. Nice!!! @binaryfruit

DriveDx just warned of pending drive failure - second time @binaryfruit app has avoided server crash.

Shout out to @BinaryFruit for offering a great product and great service over and beyond what they advertise! DriveDX is an awesome app!
Cheaper and better than it's main OS X competitors. DriveDx has a better GUI layout, clearer presentation of data, and explanations of each of the SMART attributes. Beautiful.
Absolute Must for the OS 'Toolkit'! I was having some serious issues with an SSD hybrid drive on my macbook pro, and well since seagate doesn't support mac, their 'seatools' software was useless (and required) for getting a proper exchange. That one event way more than paid for the price of the software. THIS software generated a report that was acceptable for me to get my exchange, and before the drive died completely. Got my replacement drive and I will most certainly never go back to not having it installed.
Just in Time! I downloaded DriveDx and discovered that the second HDD in my MacbookPro (in the superdive location) was having 'failing warnings', although DiskUtility said the drive was OK. So I decided that I had to replace it. I did that and enclosed the failing disk in an external enclosure to use it some more. A week later I began to have serious issues with the failing disk and ditched it. I am very happy with DriveDx, worth the money on all accounts.
I have a not so supported fusion drive in my Macbook Pro. There has never been any way to see the S.M.A.R.T. status. Decided to give this a try and the first thing that pops up is that my Crucial M4 SSD was close to failure because of a bug in the microcode. I have not tried to use this to look at my USB attached drives, since the only one I have is a small external that I boot from in emergencies. But DriveDx not only clearly sees both drives making up my fusion drive, but it also shows me the status of my 3 eSATA drives.
It's finally great to have something even better than Crystal Disk Info to monitor hard drive life signs.
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Advanced Drive Health Diagnostics
Regular diagnostic tools simply check the built-in S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive, which provides the user with little information about the actual state of the physical drive. As opposed to such tools, DriveDx analyzes the current state of the drive using all the drive health indicators that are most likely to point to a potential drive issue (for instance, SSD wear out / write endurance, I/O errors, pending sectors, reallocated bad sectors, etc). See competitive analysis against several popular products here
Drive Failing (Pre-fail) State Detection
Unlike most other tools, DriveDx detects not only “OK/Verified” and “Failed” drive health states, but also the “Failing (Pre-fail)” drive state. Thanks to that, you will detect problems much earlier than when using any other SMART monitoring utilities. This means that you have more chances to save your critical data before any data loss actually occurs. Learn more
Real-time Drive Health Monitoring
DriveDx runs in the background and periodically performs checks to determine the health of your SSD or HDD. When any issue or problem is found, it alerts you immediately. DriveDx acts as an “early warning system” for pending drive problems. As a result, you have more chances to save your critical data before any data loss actually occurs.
Early Warning System
DriveDx features a special multi-tier warning system that will inform the user about deviations from the normal state of drive attributes. It constantly monitors each S.M.A.R.T. attribute (and its change dynamics) and starts continuously warning the user as the drive degrades. On the initial stages of drive degradation, the user will receive notifications of the Warning type, then Failing (means that this drive parameter is in a pre-failure state) and only then Failed. Learn more
Drive Self-tests
DriveDx allows you to start and control diagnostic self-tests of SSD / HDD. The primary goal is to quickly identify if the drive is faulty. Usually self-tests consist of a collection of test routines like electrical and/or mechanical performance tests as well as the read performance test of the drive. Depending on self-test type it does read scan of a small area or the entire media. Learn more

Best Mac Ssd Drives

Modern SSDs and HDDs Support
When evaluating the state of various drives, DriveDx can use different heuristic algorithms depending on the drive model and even its firmware version. One of the key advantages of the software is that the state of HDD and SSD drives is assessed using different algorithms, since many state indicators of HDD drives are not applicable or make no sense for SSD drives.
Automatic E-mail Reports
The user can get problem notifications and drive status reports to email. Reporting can be configured on the basis of various criteria. Thanks to this feature, the user does not need to have physical access to a specific computer all the time, which is especially useful for all kinds of server rooms, data centers, etc.
A modern, good-looking and user-friendly interface
DriveDx is one of the first drive diagnostic tools created in the true Mac style. All interface elements are clear and intuitive, so it will only take you a few minutes to learn the basics and start using the program. When a problem is identified, you will see a notification on the desktop and the status bar will show the status of your drives. Learn more
Drive Key Metrics Evaluation
DriveDx calculates various ratings of the current status of key drive characteristics (percent values):
  • SSD lifetime left indicator (in case of an SSD drive)
Thanks to these features, users can now have a fuller and better understanding of the current state of their drive.
Drive Free Space Monitoring
Mac OS X and applications might fail due to an inability to allocate storage space. In addition, low disk space might cause disk fragmentation. To avoid data loss and to ensure the continuous functioning of your computer it is important to monitor the amount of available storage space on your drive. DriveDx can automatically monitor free disk space and will alert user immediately if user defined free space threshold exceeded. Learn more
DriveDx will protect you from data loss and downtime!

Summary :

Are you utilizing SSD now? Do you know your SSD performance? In fact, you can conduct a test via professional SSD testing software. This post will show you top 8 SSD health check tools. You can obtain detailed information about these tools in MiniTool.

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As it known to all, SSD is taking the place of HDD with its high performance. Therefore, most people utilize SSD as their operating system drive. In fact, as for SSD VS HDD, SSD has more advantages. Though SSDs are fast and more preferable, they are quite fragile.

Based on that fact, you should run SSD health check tool or optimization programs occasionally. By doing so, you can maximize your SSD’s performance and lifespan.

What Does an SSD Health Check Tool Do

Nowadays, there are many SSD testing programs on the market, and they boast different features for managing SSD. To be specific, what does an SSD health check tool do? Well, for most SSD health check tools, they can be used to test the SSD transfer speed, measure SSD performance, optimize SSD, etc. Some of them even allow you to erase SSD securely.

Given to that fact, you’d better read the software’s description carefully to check if it contains the feature you need.

The following will give you more information about what an SSD health check tool performs.

Check SSD Health

The first thing that an SSD health check tool does is to tell you how healthy your SSD is. Some SSD health check tools will show you the current state of your SSD and give you a health status, such as Crystal Disk Info.

While others such as MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition can detect how many bad sectors on your SSD, which can indicates your SSD condition. In a word, you can check whether your SSD is in good health easily with these tools.

Optimize SSD Performance

Some SSD tools enable you to carry out garbage collection and other parameters, which can improve the performance of the drive.

Most SSD health check tools allow you to optimize or tune your SSD for different demands such as Intel SSD Toolbox, Samsung Magician, etc. However, you may notice that some utilizes may improve the drive’s performance at the cost of losing some storage capacity.

Here is a step by step guide to measure disk performance for you.

Test SSD Speed

One of the basic features of SSD health check tools is SSD/Disk benchmark, which can measure your SSD performance by testing the SSD transfer speed. You will know whether the write/read data given by manufacturer is accurate after testing the speed of your SSD.

Besides, you will have a rough understanding of your SSD performance.

Secure Erase SSD

If an SSD includes sensitive information and needs to be wiped, erasing the data on the drive is a wise operation. The problem lies in that many SSD tools delete data by overwriting a drive for many times, causing accessing storage areas failure. For example, blocks can be marked as bad, or overprovisioning and wear leveling blocks.

While some SSD secure erase tools offer access to a hardware-based secure erase routine. During this process, SSD’s controller ensures that all the storage including the areas that cannot be normally and directly accessed can be cleaned entirely.

There are many SSD health check tools available in the market. Which one should you pick? 8 best SSD testers are introduced in this post. You can take them as your reference.

8 Best SSD Health Check Tools

  1. MiniTool Partition Wizard
  2. Intel SSD Toolbox
  3. Samsung Magician
  4. Crystal Disk Info
  5. Smartmonotools
  6. Hard Disk Sentinel
  7. Toshiba SSD Utility
  8. SSD Life

Top 8 SSD Health Check Tools

MiniTool Partition Wizard

MiniTool Partition Wizard is a powerful partition manager & SSD health check tool, which can help you format drive, recover missing data, analyze disk usage, migrate OS to SSD/HD, etc. The Disk Benchmark feature enables you to measure disk performance by using variable transfer sizes and test lengths for both sequential and random read/write speeds.

In addition, you can finish the whole operation in a few clicks. With this wonderful SSD benchmark tool, you can test any manufacturer’ RAID controllers, storage controllers, hard drives and SSD drives. However, if the transfer size has a large span, the whole testing process may take you some time.

You can download MiniTool Partition Wizard by clicking the button below.

After downloading and installing MiniTool Partition Wizard, please follow the steps below to perform the disk benchmark operation.

Ssd Health Status Mac

Step 1: Click Launch Application to enter its main interface.

Step 2: Click on Disk Benchmark on the top of the main page.

Step 3: In the pop-up window, you can set HD/SSD disk testing parameters including testing drive, transfer size, queue number, cool down time, thread number, total length, and test mode according to your demand. After that, click on Start to execute the operation.

Step 4: Wait for the completion of operation. Different test settings can take you different time. After the operation finishes, you will get an intuitive table just as the below picture shown.

Best External Ssd For Imac

Just as you see, MiniTool Partition Wizard enables you to perform SSD benchmark with ease. Besides, you can view the results in a direct way. So, please don’t hesitate to download it.

Intel SSD Toolbox

Intel SSD Toolbox is a piece of drive management software that enables you to supervise your drive health, estimate the remaining drive life, as well as S.M.A.R.T. attributes. It can run fast and full diagnostic scans to examine the read and write functionality of an Intel SSD.

Besides, it allows you to update firmware on a supported Intel SSD and improve the performance of an Intel SSD by making using of Trim feature. Then, you are able to obtain the best Intel SSD performance, power efficiency and endurance by checking and adjusting system settings.

With Intel SSD Toolbox, you can perform a secure erase of your secondary Intel SSD. That’s all the features of Intel SSD Toolbox.

Samsung Magician

Compared with Intel SSD Toolbox, Samsung Magician is more complicated. That is because it looks more like a management suite than a simple application. Samsung Magician allows you to create profiles, adjust performance ratings, and set the maximum capacity and reliability.

If you want to avoid any incompatibilities with operating system, you can either to update firmware or download the Magician. Actually, optimization and diagnostics are its basic features. What Samsung Magician offers through its RAID mode is the highlighted point.

The RAID mode can use 1GB of your system’s DRAM as cache for hot data or frequently-accessed data. In this way, the overall performance, especially the read speed will be improved.

More importantly, if you are not satisfied with the diagnostics results and your benchmarks, you can keep optimizing your Samsung SSD for your present OS through the OS optimization feature in Samsung Magician.

Crystal Disk Info

Crystal Disk Info is a piece of open software that can offer you the health and temperature information of your SSD or HDD. It is one of the free tools that have the capability to collect accurate data for both types of storage drives and work with drives from all manufacturers.

At the same time, general information is also provided for you. Crystal Disk Info allows you to check firmware updates, port details, buffer size, read and write speeds, power consumption and S.M.A.R.T. information. You can test SSD speed through it with ease.

What’s more, you can also use it to do some slight adjustments of power management and notifications. The only disadvantages of Crystal Disk Info are that it won’t work on Linux-based systems and cannot execute firmware updates.

Smartmonotools

The Smartmonotools includes two utility programs (smartctl and smartd), which can help you control and monitor your hard drive. It offers you real time monitoring of your hard disk. What’s more, it will analyze and inform you about possible disk degradation and failure.

Smartmonotools supports ATA/ATAPI/SATA-3 to -8 disks and SCSI disks and type devices. You can run this disk tool on Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2, Cygwin, QNX, eComStation, Windows and a Live CD.

Hard Disk Sentinel

Hard Disk Sentinel is a hard disk monitoring tool that supports Windows, Linux and Dos operating system. It is designed to find, diagnose and repair SSD issues. Disk Sentinel is also able to show you SSD health condition. It can scan either an internal or external SSD connected with USB or e-SATA and find potential issues. After that, it will generate reports with the possible fixes to repair the errors.

After you install Hard Disk Sentinel, it will run in the background and check the SSD health condition automatically. If it finds any error, it will inform you immediately. With this SSD monitoring tool, you can test the hard disk’s transfer speed in real time.

By doing so, you will know your disk benchmark, potential hard disk failures, as well as performance degradations.

Toshiba SSD Utility

Solid State Drives For Mac

If you are using OCZ SSD now, Toshiba SSD Utility is possibly the best software that you can utilize regardless of your operating system. You can monitor your SSD in real time and obtain SSD information including SSD health, remaining life, storage space and overall performance very quickly via using Toshiba SSD Utility.

Additionally, it can also be used as a drive manager and optimization tool. You are able to switch between multiple modes based on your SSD or your rig’s intended use such as gaming, workstation, video editing and so on. By using these preset modes, you can improve the drive’s performance and increase its lifespan in various cases.

Tip: Toshiba SSD Utility won’t work on 32-bit systems.

SSD Life

SSD Life mainly focuses on SSD health and remaining life instead of other metrics. It has great compatibility with major SSD manufacturers like Apple MacBook Air’s own SSD. It allows you to run diagnostics for SSD health, lifespan and overall performance. SSD Life will tell you accurate results and any important flaws that can influence the remaining lifespan or read/write speeds.

However, the free trial version only lasts seven days and has limitations on some features. After the trial expiration date reaches, you need to pay for it for later-on using.

Conclusion

Now, all the contents about SSD health check tools have been told to you. It’s your turn to make a choice. You can pick one according to your demand. If you pick MiniTool Partition Wizard, you can check SSD health by following the given steps in the post. While for other SSD health check

tools, you should follow the on-screen steps to finish the operation.

If you have any doubt or advice to MiniTool software, please contact us by writing an email directly via [email protected].

SSD Health Check FAQ

There are 5 signs indicate that your SSD is failing.

  1. There are errors involving bad blocks.
  2. Files cannot be read or written.
  3. The file system needs to be repaired.
  4. Your computer frequently crashes.
  5. Your drive becomes read-only.

If these signs appear, it indicates that your SSD is failing and you need to take some measure.

You can make use of professional SSD health check tools such as MiniTool Partition Wizard, Intel SSD Toolbox, Samsung Magician to check SSD health and test SSD speed. After downloading the software from the official website and installing it to your PC, you can check SSD according to the given guide.
SSD health check tools can help you monitor your SSD performance. Besides, some of them enable you to optimize your SSD to keep the drive fit. For instance, Intel SSD Toolbox can improve the performance of an Intel SSD by using its Trim feature.
As most SSDs are made up of NAND flash, the calculations are based on average NAND write cycles. Here is a formula to calculate the lifespan of SSD. The equation is cycles x capacity / SSD factor x data written per year.