Solid-state drives, or SSD, are all the rage nowadays – their popularity grows as their cost decreases and capacity expands. SSD are orders of magnitude faster than the traditional hard drive. SSD data is stored onto memory chips and don’t require the physical nature of spinning a disk platter for reads and writes like a traditional hard drive. Simply put, with no moving parts the performance ramps up amazingly quick. Additionally, they are widely considered to be more stable and resilient.

So what’s the catch? Outside of cost and capacity issues – dollars per GB vs cents per GB on a hard drive, SSD has a limited number of writes available before predicted failure. A SSD may be rated and warranted for 1,000,000 writes but what exactly does that mean to a user? Not much – we just aren’t used to dealing with these types of measurements. Traditional hard drives’ life spans are measured in hours of use; that is understood by everyone. So how does one translate the number of writes on a SSD and predict how much life is left?

SSDlife is a Windows application that leverages the SMART subsystem of the SSD to return useful statistics on the health of the device. SMART is nothing new of course, all spinning hard drives incorporate the same technology. However,  because SSD is a different type of device it requires a slightly different interpretation of SMART metrics – which is exactly what SSDlife provides.

On first launch SSDlife will scan the system for any and all attached SSD. It will return with a populated tab for each device found – on which you will see all sorts of information and metrics including: free/used space, hours of operation, and estimated life time. Gathered information is even further simplified into a simple bar graph that visualizes the overall health of the drive from 0-100.

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