Microsoft has revealed that Windows 10 is getting a new storage health monitoring feature that will alert users when their SSDs are about to call it quits. Being that SSDs are growing increasingly popular but prone to sudden failure, this should have been implemented a long time ago, but better late than never.
“Attempting to recover data after drive failure is both frustrating and expensive,” Microsoft wrote. “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.”
“Clicking on the notification or navigating to the drive properties page in Storage Settings (Settings – System – Storage – Manage disks and volumes – Properties) will provide additional details.”
Obviously, this is of little use to hardware enthusiasts who already utilize some kind of monitoring solution (e.g., Hard Disk Sentinel or Stablebit Scanner), but the addition could be a life saver for casual users.
The storage health monitoring feature can now be tested as part of Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20226. We’re assuming that it’ll officially debut in the next big OS update, 20H2, which is scheduled for release this month.