How to Check SSD Health and Temperature on GhostBSD

Monitoring your SSD’s health and operating temperature is essential for maintaining system stability and preventing data loss. Whether you’re running GhostBSD daily or just exploring FreeBSD-based systems, this tutorial shows you how to inspect your SSD using terminal tools.

This guide is especially helpful if you:

• Just purchased a new SSD and want to verify its condition
• Are considering buying a second-hand SSD and need to assess its wear level
• Want to monitor your current SSD’s health over time to catch issues early

GhostBSD, built on FreeBSD, offers powerful utilities like smartctl to check temperature, lifespan, and performance metrics from the terminal.

Step 1: Identify Your SSD Device

Open a terminal and run the following command to list NVMe storage devices and their namespaces:

ls /dev/nvme*

You’ll typically see output like:

/dev/nvme0
/dev/nvme0ns1

The device ending in ns1 represents the namespace, your SSD’s logical volume.

Step 2: Check SSD Health Using smartctl

Install smartmontools it with:

sudo pkg install smartmontools

Then, run the following command to view detailed SMART data:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0ns1

This will output key health metrics, including:

• Critical Warning: General health status; 0x00 means no warnings.
• Temperature: Current operating temperature in Celsius; ideally below 50°C.
• Available Spare: Percentage of reserve blocks available; 100% means full health.
• Percentage Used: Wear level of the SSD; lower values indicate longer lifespan.
• Data Units Read/Written: Total data transferred through the device.
• Power Cycles / Power On Hours: Number of times powered on and total runtime.

Example SMART Output Explained

Note: This is a partial excerpt. Actual SMART output includes many more detailed metrics and diagnostic fields.

Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 28 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 5%
Percentage Used: 5%
Data Units Read: 24,189,912 [12.3 TB]
Data Units Written: 31,701,181 [16.2 TB]
Power Cycles: 4,035
Power On Hours: 15,913

This output reflects a healthy SSD. Low operating temperature, full spare block capacity, and only 5% of its lifespan consumed which means the drive is still 95% good and has plenty of life left.

Additional Commands for SSD Info

For more device-level insights, try:

gpart show
camcontrol devlist

These commands list storage devices and their identifiers, helping you confirm which drive is in use.

Summary

Regular SSD health checks help you catch potential issues early, before they lead to performance drops or data loss. GhostBSD’s FreeBSD-based tools make it easy to monitor your drive’s status directly from the terminal, giving you peace of mind and full control over your system’s reliability.