It’s easy enough to tell when a hard drive is beginning to fail because the way in which it happens at least gives you warning signs. You’ll either hear the infamous click-click-click or maybe a click-whirr-click-click, or in more brazen fashion a CLICK that sounds almost like a slap right before the drive dies for good.

Flash memory on the other hand is a totally different story; it has no moving parts so there’s nothing to listen for to detect a failure. That being the case, what do you go by then?

In the worst case scenario, the same horror story has been told many times in many different places on the internet concerning Solid State Disk, a.k.a. SSD. One day you go to boot, and the drive is dead. No warning whatsoever. If the SSD is accessible and still shows as a size other than zero using your drive software utility of choice, you have some – albeit little – assurance you can get some data off of it, but it will take a long, long time to get that file copy, and like with attempting to recover data off near-dead platter-hard drives, the copy may be corrupt when finished.

In just about every other scenario, flash memory gives some indication it’s going bad by having random bad file reads and writes.

Knowing when a USB stick is going bad is fairly easy. You go to copy a file to or from it, and the process locks up or crashes your operating system regardless of what OS you have. After a reboot if the same thing happens twice in a row, try the stick in another computer to confirm it’s not a file locking issue. If on the second computer similar ‘weirdness’ happens, it’s a good bet the stick is bad. You could copy the data off the stick and format it, but it won’t be long before the same problem happens again.

With SSD, the completely non-technical way (which is more or less the only way) to know if SSD is starting to come close to failure is when you boot your OS and "everything goes wrong". The OS takes a long time to boot. Once in the OS, apps crash for seemingly no reason. Simple things like opening new tabs in your web browser causes the system to almost lock up. Out of desperation you reboot the computer, and all problems magically seem to fix themselves a little too easily as far as you’re concerned. Well, it’s not magic, it’s indicative the SSD is about to have a failure; this is especially true if the slowness/locking up seemed to happen out of nowhere and you know your system is clean of malware.

Is there a utility specifically to scan SSD?

Any reputable software utility than can scan RAID arrays can usually scan SSD storage devices as well. If not, one way to see if your SSD is performing up to spec or not is with a benchmark utility, such as Disk Benchmark from ATTO. Yes, it’s free, and you can use it to test read and write speeds against the original specs of the speeds your SSD was billed as capable of doing. If there’s a very large (and we’re talking sticking out like a sore thumb) difference between the billed speed and what Disk Benchmark reports, one word: Backup.

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