Then why do PCs let you check your SSD / HDD health and integral info through OS codes, while phones (Android based specifically) have no such commands ? Doesn’t it make more sense to include such things in phones since they hold sensitive personal data, and therefore are just as prone to data loss as PC hard drives ? (if not more, since you can’t just swap a phone’s storage unit if it starts to fail…)
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There may be some phones which allow you to see remaining lifetime of the storage. However there is usually not anything you can do about it with modern phones except get a new phone and restore from backup. With a PC you can just replace the hard drive. The indicator is also not a good indicator of when the disk will fail. It counts the number of sectors which have already failed and have been remapped to available working sectors. However there is no way of knowing how soon other sectors will fail. It might be that a lot of sectors will fail tomorrow causing your 90% lifecycle remaining disk to completely fail.
Traditional computers were meant to be tools for the user. Desktops in particular are designed to be easily expanded and repaired as needed. This design comes from a time where buying a personal computer was a significant investment, and people would keep them for a long time. Part of that can still be seen in gaming computers. The tools you are talking about come from that design.
Phones are not meant to be a tool for the user. They are meant to be advertising channels for marketing departments, points of sales for corporations, and analytics collectors for industry and government. They are designed to be inaccessible and impossible to repair (or modify) by the user. This forces you to replace your phone every few years, which works well for the industry as well, since you are financing the upgrade of their advertising channel/point of sale/surveillance device for them.
Or did you think you owned your phone?
Hard disk health check things are a holdover from a time when solid state drives didn’t exist and disk based drives weren’t particularly reliable.
Disc based drives consist of a physical disk that spins around extremely rapidly while a small needle hovers extremely close to it without touching.
Back in ye olde days there were a lot of reliability issues with the bearing that held the disk in place, as well as the machinery that moved the needle around. It wasn’t unusual to get a drive whose disc had been scratched because it had been handled roughly. The most common failure mode was also that the bearing or needle assembly would go bad and begin nicking the disc.
Hard drive health tools were there to help you identify whether the issue with your brand new but under capacity disk was that it had been mislabeled or damaged in shipping. For older drives, it was a way to see if the disc nicking process had begun, which indicated that the drive itself was about to fail.
Modern disc drives don’t have those reliability issues. For a disc drive, the two most common failure methods are the motor dying or a capacitor on the drive’s control board blowing. Its similar for solid state drives – basically the only failure mode is a capacitor failing. A disc sector health scan doesn’t tell you anything about whether you’re nearing a failure.
All phones are using flash memory which is generally good for about 1000 write cycles.
On a PC, its feasible to write enough to the drive to hit the lifespan. A 1 TB drive can support about 1 PB written to it and if you’re doing video editing you can get to this number. To kill a drive in 3 year you have to write 1% of its capacity per day, this is possible but hard aside from a few specific workloads
Phones have much shorter lifespans and the OS takes up a disproportionate amount of space on the drive so you can’t write to it regularly. To run into flash failure on a 256 GB phone you’d need to be writing 2.5GB/day every day for 3 years. That’s about 300 photos per day.
Because you can’t run the heavy workloads on phones and they aren’t expected to keep chugging for 10 years (the first smartphone only released 15 years ago) flash failure from wearout is pretty much a non-issue. You *might* be able to do it if you tried, but no one is going to accidentally wearout their onboard flash storage.
This is further helped by “overprovisioning” where we include 10-20% extra flash than stated to provide fresh blocks to be swapped in when some have been written to a lot. This, combined with wear leveling, gives you quite a long time before you start having a reduction in capacity or losing data. When flash hits wear out the controller will generally put it into read only mode so you can still recover your data even in this event
That said, spontaneous failure due to defects is always an option. Just because the wearout mechanism isn’t a huge concern doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be backing up your data
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