10 Failing SSD Symptoms Suggest: Rescue Your Data Right Now

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are faster, steadier, and use less energy compared to regular hard disk drives (HDDs). However, they can fail suddenly without warning. That's why knowing the signs of SSD failure could mean saving your data instead of losing thousands of photos or days of work.

10 failing SSD symptoms indicate data loss risks

How to tell if SSD is failing? If your computer shows these 10 symptoms, that means your SSD will fail soon; it's best to make a backup to prevent data loss.

1. System crashes or freezes happen often, even at startup.

2. Saving files or any other response takes a very long time.

3. Can't open or read specific files.

4. You need to restart the system frequently.

5. The system warns about bad sectors or blocks.

6. Your disk drive gets too hot (overheat).

7. Firmware errors occur.

8. Strange noises come from the drive.

9. Files or folders disappear suddenly.

10. Error messages say the file system needs fixing.

If your PC shows these SSD drive failure symptoms, you'd better conduct a full and comprehensive disk health test to see if you need to replace a new SSD and transfer your important data to keep it safe. Otherwise, you are likely to suffer data loss.

Run a comprehensive disk test when failing SSD symptoms appear

To do a full and comprehensive disk health test when you see the SSD drive failure symptoms, you can try AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. This tool is free and designed for managing disks and partitions on Windows systems such as 11/10/8/8.1/7. It provides several helpful features to check disk health and fix disk issues. Here, we'll share 3 test types you can select according to your needs.

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▶ Disk Health Check

It checks how healthy your disk is by gathering S.M.A.R.T. data. If it finds any issues, you'll get a message telling you to back up your data. No matter you are using HDD or SSD, you can run this feature to check the disk.

Good: The disk is healthy and safe to use without concerns.

Caution: Some attributes, apart from temperature, are nearing their threshold. While the disk remains operational, it's recommended to back up important data as a precaution.

Bad: Attributes, excluding temperature, have reached or fallen below their threshold. This indicates potential disk failure and data loss. It's imperative to back up data immediately and prepare a new disk for data transfer.

▶ Disk Speed Test

This feature measures how fast your hard drive reads and writes data. It has two test modes: Simple and Pro. Simple lets you pick the drive and run the test. Pro gives more details. Once it's done, you can save the results.

▶ Surface Test & Partition Check

These features help find any bad sectors/blocks on your hard drive. You can do a basic check or fix errors using CHKDSK on SSD.

To check for bad sectors on a disk, select the disk you want to test and move it to the top pane. Then, choose "Test" > "Disk Surface Test".

If you want to check whether there are bad sectors on a partition, you can right-click the target partition and choose "Advanced"> "Check Partition".

Once the checking process is complete, you'll see both healthy and damaged sectors listed.

How to effectively transfer data if failing SSD symptoms suggest?

If you find that your SSD is close to corruption and any tests or symptoms indicate the need to create a backup or prepare a new disk for data transfer, you can also rely on the aforementioned multifunctional software. The AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional edition offers the Clone Disk function.

With this software, you can easily transfer data between SSDs, HDDs, or vice versa. It can even clone a larger disk to a smaller one, like from a 1TB HDD to a 500GB SSD. Besides, it can clone disks with bad sectors and let you resize partitions before cloning. What's more, it features hot cloning, allowing you to clone disks and systems without interrupting work or stopping programs.

Here we take the example of cloning a large disk to a smaller one when you see the signs of SSD failure.

Step 1. Open the installed AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk like SSD and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the destination disk to store the data on the source disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to Optimize the performance of SSD if the target disk is an SSD drive. 

Tip: If you want to clone Windows to a smaller drive, the "Clone without resizing partitions"  button will be greyed out. Then, a Note about how to boot OS from the destination disk will pop up. Read and keep it in mind.

 Step 5. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

Notes:✎...

 Back up all important files on the source drive as they will be overwritten during the cloning process.

 As it involves system partition, it needs to be performed under PreOS mode, thus a reboot is necessary.

Boot from the cloned smaller drive after cloning

If you want to keep the larger disk as a storage device and the new disk as a boot device, you can boot from cloned new SSD:

1. Restart your computer and keep pressing Esc, F1, F2, F8, or F10 during the initial startup screen to enter BIOS settings.

2. In the Boot option screen, choose the new cloned smaller drive as the boot drive.

3. If you clone GPT to MBR or MBR to GPT, you need to change boot mode from UEFI to Legacy or Legacy to UEFI.

4. Save all the changes and exit from BIOS setup utility.

If you don’t need to keep the old larger drive, shut down the computer, disconnect the source disk and connect the destination disk to the socket of the source disk.

Further reading: How to recover data from failed SSD?

There is another situation where you find it’s too late to realize the failing SSD symptoms suggestions. Regrettably, you'll only realize to back up or transfer data after losing it. Again, let’s put our eyes on the powerful software again, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It’s Recover Data function comes to rescue you

As long as the data hasn't been overwritten, there's a chance to retrieve it if you experience data loss due to SSD corruption. However, the longer you wait, the higher the chance of permanent data loss. Therefore, it's recommended to recover data from a failed SSD as soon as you see the failing SSD symptoms that lead to data loss.

Step 1. After installing it, click Recover > Recover Data from the top panel.

Step 2. Choose the SSD drive and click Start Scan.

Step 3. After scanning, all lost data on this drive will be listed. You should tick the lost files and click Recover file.

Step 4. Then, choose a path to save these files.

Step 5. When finished, go to the path to find them.

Conclusion

When you see the 10 failing SSD symptoms, it is a good idea to run AOMEI Partition Assistant to check your disk health, create a backup, or transfer data. Once you suffer data loss, you can also try its Recover Data function.

After changing a new SSD or successfully fix disk issues, you can use it to move installed programs to another drive, convert disk between MBR/GPT, regular clean your PC, and so on. For Windows Server users, it offers the Server edition.