Summary :
Plug external hard drive into your Mac. Go into Applications Utilities Disk Utility. On the top menu of the Disk Utility window you will see 'First Aid' (see screenshot above), click to run the check. If all goes well it will produce a green check mark. We have collected the best free Windows and Mac tools to check SSD health and to monitor performance. #1: Hard Disk Sentinel – Check HDD/SSD Performance & Health HDSentinel is a hard disk monitoring software and it supports Linux, Windows and even DOS. Your Mac is not a delicate flower, it's a powerful number cruncher and even if you only use it to check Facebook or work on a Pages document, it's nice to know it can handle an afternoon of RAW photo editing or a Final Cut Pro montage of your niece's graduation when needed. On a Mac, you will use Disk Utility to check SSD health. To access this program, go to Finder Applications Utilities and then choose the desired drive you wish to check. How do I check the health of my SSD Mac? Once you've selected the appropriate drive in Utilities, look at the section labeled 'S.M.A.R.T Status'. Mac users can easily check the SMART status of their hard drives and internal disk storage by using Disk Utility in Mac OS, offering a simple way to see if the disk hardware itself is in good health or is experiencing a hardware issue.
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.
Quick Navigation :
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
- MiniTool Partition Wizard
- Intel SSD Toolbox
- Samsung Magician
- Crystal Disk Info
- Smartmonotools
- Hard Disk Sentinel
- Toshiba SSD Utility
- 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.
How to reset minecraft mac. 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.
Step 1: Click Launch Application to enter its main interface.
New call of duty release date. 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. Free zeus slots no download. 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. Mac os x time capsule. After the operation finishes, you will get an intuitive table just as the below picture shown.
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.
-image from downloadcenter.intel.com
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.
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.
Quick Navigation :
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
- MiniTool Partition Wizard
- Intel SSD Toolbox
- Samsung Magician
- Crystal Disk Info
- Smartmonotools
- Hard Disk Sentinel
- Toshiba SSD Utility
- 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.
How to reset minecraft mac. 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.
Step 1: Click Launch Application to enter its main interface.
New call of duty release date. 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. Free zeus slots no download. 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. Mac os x time capsule. After the operation finishes, you will get an intuitive table just as the below picture shown.
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.
-image from downloadcenter.intel.com
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.
-image from samsung.com
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.
-image from crystalmark.info
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. Monkey in the bank casino game.
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.
Mac Check Hard Drive Health
-image from hdsentinel.com
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
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.
-image from toshiba.com
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.
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.
Mac os shortcuts. -image from toshiba.com
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].
Mac Disk Drive
SSD Health Check FAQ
Ssd Disk Health Check
There are 5 signs indicate that your SSD is failing.
- There are errors involving bad blocks.
- Files cannot be read or written.
- The file system needs to be repaired.
- Your computer frequently crashes.
- Your drive becomes read-only.
If these signs appear, it indicates that your SSD is failing and you need to take some measure.
Disk Health Check Mac
How to check your Mac's hard drive health status?
Internal storage is one of the most important components of any computer. This where the operating system and all software resides. Therefore, any crashes on the hard disk (HDD) or flash drive (SSD) might lead to a Mac failure or, even worse, data loss. Periodically checking the health status of the hard drive is a good precaution against any data loss or unexpected software crashes. Note that hard disks and especially flash drives often have a limited number of write cycles. Whether internal or external storage, drives are susceptible to failures over time.
Before data loss or problems accessing the Mac, you should be able to detect the warning signs of drive failures: random freezes, freezes when attempting to move files, errors stating that permissions are denied when attempting to access files or data (which previously were accessed regularly without problems). There might also be a number of other random or erratic issues relating to hard drive failure. Fortunately, Apple has included a built-in tool that is able to check and repair minor damage to storage. This method works on both internal and external storage (hard disk drive or flash drive). Furthermore, you can repair the startup disk by using the file system check function. In this article, we describe the methods available to check drive health status and attempt to repair bad sectors and other issues.
Table of Contents:
It is recommended to run a free scan with Malwarebytes - a tool to detect malware and fix computer errors. You will need to purchase the full version to remove infections and eliminate computer errors. Free trial available.
Check hard drive health via Disk Utility
As mentioned above, do not wait until you encounter erratic issues before checking the current status of the hard drive. To prevent any data loss or performance problems, periodically inspect the drive. This is quite simple using a built-in tool relating to the hard drive called Disk Utility. Use Spotlight by pressing the keyboard shortcut of Command and Spacebar, and then type Disk Utility. Alternatively, go to the Utilities folder under Application via Finder. Once you have launched the application, select one of connected drives from the list in the left hand sidebar. Click the First Aid button in the top middle of the window. You will be prompted to confirm your action. Click Run.
If you are trying to check the status of a startup disk, another warning will pop up, stating that you are trying to verify a booted drive. To perform a complete check, the operating system will be frozen. If you are not performing any important, active tasks, click Run. All software will regain its full functionality immediately the verification process finishes.
When the First Aid function completes, the resultant message will state that the hard drive is OK. Otherwise, click Repair disk (if suggested) or try repeating the First Aid procedure until the result indicates that the hard drive is OK. Disk Utility is sometimes unable to repair a booted drive - in this case, follow the next method.
Repair startup disk via macOS Recovery mode
Hard Disk Health Check Download
If you have encountered a situation whereby Disk Utility is unable to repair the hard drive when it is booted, there is another way to access the tool without loading the Mac. You are advised to first create a backup of the storage - the easiest way to do this is by using Time Machine. When you have prepared a backup, shut down the Mac and then press and hold Option (Alt), Command, and R while starting the computer. Keep holding the keys until the Apple logo or spinning Globe appears. From the macOS Utilities window, select Disk Utility.
Repeat the procedure to check the hard drive - select one of the connected drives from the list in the left hand sidebar. Next, click the First Aid button in the top middle of the window. You will be prompted to confirm your action. Click Run. Finally, click Repair disk if prompted and attempt to automatically repair the hard drive. Checking hard drive health status is good prevention against unexpected issues and data loss, however, also maintain regular backups, since hard drive failures can sometimes occur without any warning signs.
Use Single User Mode to repair hard drive
The most efficient method might be to boot the Mac into Single User Mode and use the fsck command - a shortcut to launch the file system check feature. First, create a backup and then shut down your computer. To access this mode, press and hold Command and S immediately after hearing the startup chime. In Single User Mode, you should see a lot of white text on a black display. Be patient, since this boot might take some time. Once booting is finished, each new line will be prepended with 'localhost//'. Type the following command and press Return to execute:
- fsck -fy
When the checking process is finished, look for a message stating 'The volume appears to be OK' in the results. Otherwise, repeat the system check until you receive this message. Finally, type reboot and press Return to exit Single User Mode. When the computer is completely booted, launch disk check via Disk Utility again to ensure everything is working properly. If none of these steps resolved the hard drive issues, contact Apple Store or a licensed technician.
Video Showing how to check Mac hard drive health status
