What SSDHero is
SSDHero reads the health data your Mac’s SSD and your Thunderbolt drives already keep: how much of their rated life they’ve used, their temperature, errors and spare capacity. It turns that into one health score and a sentence you can act on.
It’s a native Swift app, designed around macOS: a window when you want the detail, a quiet place in your menu bar, and thoughtful alerts when something changes.
SSDHero is an informational monitoring tool. It isn’t a backup, a data-recovery service or a repair tool, and a healthy reading doesn’t mean a drive can’t fail. Keep regular backups whatever it says.
What it shows
- One health score. Life left, capped by spare capacity, minus errors, with the numbers behind it and a plain-language verdict.
- A lifespan forecast. An estimate in years that sharpens as SSDHero learns how you use your Mac. It estimates rated endurance; it doesn’t predict a failure date.
- History and swap. How much is written to the drive each day, and how much of it is swap: what your Mac writes to the SSD when it runs out of memory.
- External drives. A check card the moment you plug one in, live read and write speed, and the link speed the drive really got (for example PCIe 3.0 ×2 or USB 10 Gb/s).
- RAID-aware. Mirror members are grouped and ejected together.
- Menu bar item and desktop widgets. Each drive’s status, a glance away.
- Notifications. When a drive’s status gets worse, space runs low, or a drive runs hot.
- Health report. Save it as a PDF for a buyer or a repair shop, and send it yourself.
- Benchmark. One you start yourself. It writes a temporary test file to a volume you pick and deletes it afterwards.
- Light and dark themes.
External drives
Plug in a drive and a card slides in under the menu bar. It checks the drive, tells you in plain words, and writes nothing to it. What SSDHero can read depends on how the drive connects:
- Thunderbolt and USB4 NVMe drives: full health, read directly.
- USB SSDs and hard drives on macOS 27: full health too. Many are read through macOS itself, without unmounting anything. Others you hand to SSDHero once from the menu bar, and macOS remembers; a check then unmounts the drive for a few seconds, never by force.
- USB NVMe enclosures, and USB drives on earlier macOS: link speed, activity and error counters.
- SD cards: capacity, free space and errors. SD cards don’t share health data with the Mac.
Who it’s for
Anyone who wants to know whether their drive is okay without decoding a table of numbers. In particular:
- Mac owners who want to know how their SSD is doing, and roughly how long it has left at the way they use it.
- People who carry external SSDs and hard drives, and want them checked each time they’re plugged in.
- Anyone selling a Mac, buying one, or visiting a repair shop, who wants a health report to share.
- Anyone curious how much their Mac writes to its SSD when it runs short of memory.
Privacy
SSDHero only reads the drives it checks. It never writes to them, except a benchmark you start yourself, and nothing leaves your Mac.
- No account, no analytics, and no network requests of its own.
- Its App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected.
- Health history stays on your Mac. A health report is a PDF you save and send yourself.
- The free trial and the purchase go through Apple’s App Store. SSDHero never sees your payment details.
The details are in the privacy notice.
Pricing
SSDHero will be a free download on the Mac App Store, with a 14-day free trial of every feature. After that, a one-time $9.99 in-app purchase keeps it for good. No subscription.
Without buying, SSDHero keeps showing each drive’s status in the menu bar, tells you if a drive gets worse, and still makes a drive’s Health report. Purchases and refunds are handled by Apple under the App Store’s terms.
Requirements
- macOS 14 or later.
- A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later).
- Reading a USB drive’s health needs macOS 27.
SSDHero is in testing now. The Mac App Store link will be added to this site when it is available. Questions in the meantime? Get in touch.