Microsoft has announced Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20226 with feature designed to help monitor the health of SSD storage.
SSDs have many benefits over traditional platter hard drives. They’re faster and more energy efficient, since they have no moving parts. Just as important, they’re less prone to damage. When a traditional hard drive is stopped, the head can impact the platters, scoring them and causing major damage. With no moving parts, this is less of a concern with SSDs.
Despite their durability, SSDs do have a failure rate. Corrupt data, weak solder joints, failing chips and other factors can cause an SSD to fail. Once they begin to fail, they tend to go quickly.
Microsoft is looking to give users a heads up when an SSD is about to fail, giving them time to backup before it’s too late. The latest preview release includes the new feature.
“Attempting to recover data after drive failure is both frustrating and expensive,” says Brandon LeBlanc on the company blog. “This feature is designed to detect hardware abnormalities for NVMe SSDs and notify users with enough time to act. It is strongly recommended that users immediately back up their data after receiving a notification.”