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3 easy ways to check hard drive health on Windows
Some of you might turn up your nose at mechanical hard drives, but they still exist. Whether as secondary or archival storage, on NAS devices, or in the form of external storage for creative professionals, hard drives (HDDs) still have their place in the world. As they're not particularly long-lasting (most reports claim a 3 to 5 year average lifespan), you might want to occasionally check your hard drive's health.
On Windows PCs, there are 3 simple ways to do so: using the built-in S.M.A.R.T. tool, the drive manufacturer's tools, or third-party utilities. These methods vary in terms of the details you'll get, hence not all of them will be equally useful, so we will go over what each type can offer.
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Built-in S.M.A.R.T. status
Quick but misleading
S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a built-in feature on most modern drives (HDDs and SSDs) that can monitor disk attributes and alert the user in case a drive is about to fail. This way, you can do a prompt backup, salvage your data while you still can, and replace the drive eventually.
Although you can instantly get a status report on each of your drives from the Command Prompt, it gives a binary result (OK or Pred Fail), and hence, it isn't very comprehensive. That said, it can confirm your suspicions if you're already facing access issues, file corruption, and slow read times on your hard drive.
- To get the health status of all your drives at once, type cmd in the Windows search bar and press Enter.
- In the Command Prompt window, type wmic diskdrive get model,status and press Enter.
You'll either see OK or Pred Fail next to each of the drives. The former means everything is, well, okay, while the latter stands for "predictive failure," meaning that Windows suspects the drive might fail soon. When exactly it'll happen is anyone's guess, though, so you should start backing up your crucial data and looking for a good deal on a replacement drive.
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Manufacturer tools
In the maker we trust
That's how it feels when using the tool specifically created for your drive. Your hard drive manufacturer (e.g. Seagate, WD, Adata) most likely has a drive monitoring utility that you can download when you need to check drive health. Most of these tools work for both HDDs and SSDs, so you can see the entire spectrum of information in a single tool.
Seagate has SeaTools, WD has Western Digital Dashboard, Adata has Adata SSD Toolbox, and Samsung has Samsung Magician. Using any of these is simple â just download the right version for your Windows version, and use the S.M.A.R.T functionality integrated into the program. The benefit of using this method over the Windows built-in method is that you'll see a lot more detail than a simple boolean result.
For hard drives specifically, you might not be able to see complete information, such as the remaining lifetime.
Additionally, these tools also support any specific technologies that your drive is utilizing. Each of them will also tell you the drive temperature, free capacity, remaining lifetime, and more. For hard drives specifically, you might not be able to see complete information, such as the remaining lifetime, but the tools will still show status like "Good," "Caution," or otherwise, depending on the state of the drive.
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Third-party utilities
Most popular and reliable
Using third-party utilities, such as CrystalDiskInfo, is preferred over even the manufacturer tools, as it provides the simplest, clutter-free, and lightest user interface without eliminating any important features. You just need to download the tool, launch it, and the most important information will be displayed on the first screen you see.
The tool will show "Good" or "Caution" for your hard drive, but not an estimated lifetime in percentage (as it shows for SSDs).
You can switch between each of your drives at the top, and see the health status, temperature, total reads, total writes, and a lot more information. Here, again, the tool will show "Good" or "Caution" for your hard drive, but not an estimated lifetime in percentage (as it shows for SSDs). This is because, unlike NAND flash writes on SSDs, hard drives don't have parameters that can be accurately tracked, hence giving an estimate is not possible.
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Act fast to save your data
If you're still using a hard drive on your computer, there's a chance you are storing old photos & videos, your local media collection, or other important data that you don't access regularly. If your hard drive starts showing signs of failure, or you see one of the drive monitoring tools return a poor health status, you should act quickly and back up your data before it becomes impossible (or costly) to recover.
Unlike SSDs that can fail due to write exhaustion or unexpected electrical issues, hard drives have a lot more points of failure as they use many moving parts. You never know if your hard drive will last for 10 years, 5 years, or just 2 years. So, it's recommended to monitor its health status regularly, and take the necessary steps to mitigate data loss.
