Solid State Drives are slowly becoming the new mainstream storage devices. It may still take a few years before they replace platter based hard drives but it will happen eventually. Currently both price and storage volume are not competitive, but this will change in the future. PC users who followed SSDs from the very beginning may still have stories about bad life expectancy and locked storage in their mind. The first retail generation of solid state drives had lots of issues in this regard.
With newer generation drives those factors have been mitigated or eliminated completely. Still, some PC users may need to check on their SSDs from time to time to make sure that they provide the same performance and reliability as in the beginning.
SSDLife Free is a Windows software program that can check the life expectancy of a solid state drive. It interprets the SMART data of the drive. The free version of the program supports only one connected SSD. If more than one drives are connected only the first will be analyzed and displayed.
When you start the program for the first time data about the first SSD of the system is collected and then displayed on the screen. This includes a general drive health rating at the top with the estimated lifetime of the solid state drive. The information are more detailed in the middle of the window. Here you see your drive’s model, the total drive space and free space, the work time in hours and days and the times the drive has been powered on.
The program displays furthermore if TRIM is supported by the drive, and the estimated life expectancy in more detail. Lastly, it also displays how much data was written in Gigabyte in the SSD’s life.
The expected lifetime is handy to know, as it allows users to make preparations to replace the drive when the time of “death” comes nearer.
SSDLife Free can display the SMART data of the drive in an online report in the web browser.
Users with one Solid State Drive installed on their computer can download the free software from the developer website.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: lifecycle, solid state drive, ssd, windows software
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