Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20226 adds a nifty feature to the operating system: SSD health warnings. This kind of forewarning could save end users a lot of heartache — SSDs may not have the moving parts that magnetic spinners do, but they’re still susceptible to various types of failure.
Microsoft’s blog post only refers to support for NVMe drives, so presumably this feature is only available for customers who own one. Here’s the message you don’t want to see:
Microsoft also provides an example of what its new Drive Health page looks like. This is accessible, in Build 20226, by navigating to Settings -> System -> Storage -> Manage disks and volumes -> Properties (thanks to PCMag for the tip). If your drive has gone bad, you’ll see something like the below:
This is a pretty good start, but I’d really like to see the contents of “Advanced Disk Properties” and “Click here for more information.” I’m curious, specifically, about whether Windows 10 provides any detailed information in the form of SMART codes. It would also be nice to know what sorts of errors trip the sensor and whether it distinguishes between the sorts of errors that can be a sign of normal drive aging (like the periodic substitution of good blocks for worn-out sectors) and drive-killing issues like the one flagged above.
Microsoft doesn’t seem to have published any details about how the feature works, but hopefully, we’ll get that information before long. We’ve seen tighter cohesion between the CPU and the operating system for years, as part of the advanced power management techniques used by AMD and Intel. It’s interesting to see Microsoft adding some diagnostic support for SSDs directly into Windows, and it raises the question of what other interesting support options the company might add in the future.
There’s no reason why Windows couldn’t support taking readings from various thermometers throughout a laptop, or giving end-users some degree of in-OS control over fan speeds and settings. Typically, these sorts of features are often provided by OEMs, if they’re provided at all. Often, the utilities themselves stretch the meaning of “value-added” to the breaking point, which is a fancy way of saying we wouldn’t mind if Microsoft added more fan controls and low-level component temperature data to Windows 10.
Now Read:
- Microsoft Pulls Update Slowing Windows 10 PCs, Fall Update Coming Soon
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- PCMag: The Best Internal SSDs
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