With the development of reliability theory, people realized that “absolutely reliable” machines could not be made. With its incomparable advantages, the high-speed permanent-magnet brushless DC motor is usually used in the symmetrical structure of high-speed operation working systems, which at present are widely used in aerospace and other fields. The structure of the manufacturing process involves a strict processing, but in the process of work failure could still occur. No matter what field the high-speed permanent magnet brushless DC motor is applied to, it is very important to identify states and run fault diagnosis, which is of great significance to maintain the reliability of the motor and its working system. In this study, the fault diagnosis method of a high-speed permanent-magnet brushless DC motor is studied, and a combination model of modified gray wolf optimization algorithm (MGWO) and support vector machine (SVM) have been proposed for the motor fault diagnosis research. Based on the traditional gray wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm, the optimization performance of the algorithm is improved by initializing the population through a tent map and introducing a sine wave dynamic adaptive factor. Then the modified algorithm is used to optimize the internal parameters of SVM to improve the diagnostic accuracy of the model. Through the signal acquisition test, the current signals under different fault states and faultless states were collected, and the current signal data set required for the experiment is obtained. The experimental result showed that, compared with GWO or sailfish optimization (SFO) optimized SVM models, Extreme learning machine and Back Propagation neural network classical classification models, the fault diagnosis accuracy of the proposed model is the highest, proving the excellent classification performance and good robustness of the MGWO-SVM model.