While SSD drives are awesome and give excellent performance, we all have a fear of the "Sudden SSD Death Syndrome" or that sudden "hey why did my computer just die" moment. While spinning-platter drives also wear out and die, the risk of SSD drive failure weighs in the back of our collective mind. A truism going around is that "overprovisioning" your SSD drive will ensure a longer lifespan for the drive.

SSD drives are awesome, they're fast, they consume little power, they're light weight, and so on. But we all worry about whether the drive will unexpectedly die, since a truism going around is that SSD drives will just up-and-quit taking your whole computer with it. It's useful, therefore, to have fore-warning by monitoring the health of your SSD drive. A key is to ensure your drive has the S.M.A.R.T. feature (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). The next key is getting software that can query S.M.A.R.T. data, presenting it in a way that makes sense to you.