As the price of Solid State Drives (SSD) continues dropping it seems more people are starting to shift over to them for daily use in a myriad of ways. Last May I changed my netbook to a SSD (Upgrading to a Solid State Drive (SSD) on my ASUS Eee PC 1000HE) and then this past January I did the same thing with my desktop PC (How To- Use an SSD Drive as Main Drive for Windows 7).
Since then I could not be happier with the performance of both systems. The speed increases are obvious with boot times taking 15-20 seconds and waking up from hibernation is in the 8 second range.
Windows 7 was built SSD smart so it knows how to take advantage of these high speed drives and uses TRIM support to keep them running well. When it comes to diagnostics and disk status you get the same properties for an SSD as you do for a spinning hard drive on your Windows system.
Well I recently discovered a utility, SSD Life, that will check my SSD’s and give me a health status with quite a bit of information including their expected life expectancy.
Here are the screenshots from my desktop and notebook SSD checks:
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These are examples of the online report you can get from the free version about your SSD’s:
Check out those life expectancies! Even the drive with more usage is expected to have a longer life expectancy. Of course there is more info like basic S.M.A.R.T. data, how many times the drive has been cycled on and it also monitors your throughput on the SSD.
These screenshots are from the free version but there is a Pro version offered that gives you more details for just $19 and the developer is currently offering a %15 discount if you buy through the in program offer. The free version offers plenty of data but the pro version will get you even more in depth and it supports multiple SSD’s in the same system.
So if you’re already joining the ranks of Windows users running Solid State Drives in your computer systems then you should check out SSD Life.
Let us know what you think of the software.
