Solid-state drives are much faster than mechanical hard drives, but they are not immune to failure, and are prone to this without warning.
Microsoft aims to avoid this potential disaster by adding a new feature to monitor drive health to the Windows 10 operating system.
Brandon LeBlanc, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, says in announcing the Windows 10 feature "Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20226". This new drive health monitoring feature "is designed to detect hardware anomalies of NVMSD drives." (NVMe SSD).
A notification will appear on the desktop when such a defect is detected stating that "the storage device may be at risk of failure and requires your attention. There is also a clickable link to download Windows 10 backup options and drive management, which also provides more details on why Windows sends the notification." .
Seeing this notification pop up is a signal to stop everything you do, focus on backing up all your data, and there is a good chance you will manage the risk of losing your device's contents.
It is possible to check the health of the drive at any time in version 20226, just go to Settings, then System, then to Storage, then manage disks and volumes, and then finally choose properties, where there is "Drive Health" information, and there you will see the estimated remaining life For the drive, its current temperature and any warnings in red text, there is also a "backup now" option if you want to do this step.
If you do not want to use the Windows backup option, there are a number of great backup applications to choose from, and you can always take precaution by using an online backup service.