Instructions to check the health of your hard drive on your computer

The hard drive is considered the brain of the computer because it is where your data is stored. Damaged other hardware can be replaced, but the loss of data in the hard drive will cause many people a headache. Therefore, regularly check the health of the hard drive and the status of read and write operations is never redundant.

Of all the computer hardware, few people pay attention to the health of the hard drive. We’ve all heard the warnings about defragmenting our drives and cleaning out junk files to make our computers work faster. No matter how well maintained you are, however, at some point the drive will fail. Sometimes you can hear the hard drive stop working suddenly while working on a project or cases where the motherboard does not recognize the hard drive.

No matter how your hard drive ends up, you will definitely see it happen if you use the computer for a long time. Hard drives are complex little devices. The main components are the magnetic disks that hold the data, as well as the data read and write heads.

Dropping the laptop or unexpected movement of the desktop case will cause the hard drive to be damaged irreparably. However, the frequency and hours of operation of hard drives also determine their lifespan. Here are the software to help you check the health of the hard drive to see if it is still working properly? And you will decide to replace the hard drive with a new one or continue using it.

Use WMIC on Windows to check hard drive health

The first tool for keeping tabs on the hard drive is the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting feature, or the SMART feature. This system is built into most modern hard drives and SSDs and is designed to report when your hard drive fails or crashes. Hard drive manufacturers can approach SMART themselves, but they usually measure similar performance points like read failure rate, mechanical shock, hard drive temperature, time performance lookup, etc.

Most of the time the SMART system works in the background, but you can make it visible in a few ways.

The simplest way is to use the command line utility WMIC of Windows, short for Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line. This basic tool will display hard cell health check results based on SMART stats. Open Windows CMD and type the command: wmic diskdrive get model,status.

On the screen will show the hard drive mounted on the computer and the health status.

If you see the status OK You can rest assured that your hard drive is stable.

CrystalDisk Info

If you want a bit more detailed hard drive health check then another option is to use CrystalDisk Info. This is free software that can display a lot of information about your hard drive, CrystalDisk Info is a comprehensive read, write and health test tool for computers. Who ever buys SSD Everyone uses this tool to check the quality of the hard drive.

The top area is probably informative enough for most people, CrystalDisk Info shows the status for each drive using a color coding system: Good (blue), Caution (yellow), Bad (red) and Unknown (gray). Most of the time you will only see a Good status, but if you see one of the other states, it’s time to replace the hard drive if you don’t want unexpected data loss.

But here’s what to check for SMART status: It’s not 100% reliable. A Google study published in 2007: The authors found that 36% of failed drives were still reported as SMART

Things haven’t changed much either. In 2016, Backblaze reported that it saw 23.3% of its data center drives fail without reporting issues from five SMART attributes.

Statistically speaking, most disks report SMART issues before they fail; however, the statistics become less reliable when trying to predict the failure time of a drive. In other words, the SMART feature of this tool is not very accurate.

SMART is also part of SSD, but it has the same limitations as HDD. The current best solution for SSDs is to use monitoring tools provided by the drive manufacturer such as: Crucial’s Storage Executive, WD’s SSD Dashboard or Samsung’s Magician (for EVO 860 and later).

Monitoring from the outside

In spite of SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a useful tool to check the health of your hard drive, but you should also monitor the sound coming from the hard drive. For example, if you start hearing noise coming from your PC, it’s most likely the hard drive. Maybe the hard drive’s life is nearing the end, you should replace it immediately.

Even if you don’t hear funny noises, your drive can cause weird things like frequent crashes, large numbers or error messages, folder or file names with weird characters, performance problems, etc. productivity is very slow or the document is suddenly filled with garbage. Most of these problems are a pretty obvious sign your drive’s life is coming to an end, but that’s not always the case.

First, check if the hardware driver is up to date. This is a good basic step for any component, and it can improve the performance of your storage hard drive if you run into problems.

If you have already updated the driver but it doesn’t improve anything, please command chkdsk (check disk) with CMD. If your hard disk is old, run this command every few months. Command chkdsk when you are using Admin rights, open CMD from Start button and select Run as Administrator.

To check the status of all types of drives, simply type chkdsk and press Enter, this command only shows the error but does not fix it. If you want it to fix the problem, you need to run the disk checker with the /F or /R option.

• /F option to focus on fixing filesystem errors
• /R includes the functions of /f and adds the ability to correct bad sectors and other physical errors.

Example to check and fix drive errors D: you use the command chkdsk D: /f

If you fix the drive error, C: You will need to restart your computer for the error scanning process to take place.

Windows 10 is set up to run chkdsk automatically, so sometimes you will see Windows automatically check the health of your hard drive for you.

Always have a backup plan for important data

To avoid the worst effects of hard drive storage, make sure you’re making regular backups. The best option is to use a backup plan to store important data, such as File History on Windows. This way, if a recent backup has the same drive, you can go back in time to get their previous versions. In addition, you can also use specialized Backup software.

AnonyViet recommends that you also use a cloud backup service (Google Drive, DropBox….) so you have an external copy. An alternative is to use an external hard drive for regular backups, or play RAID for safety.

When you start to see hard drive failures that cannot be fixed with a check disk, it’s time to replace the drive as soon as possible. If the errors can be repaired, you can extend the life of the hard drive a little, but it is advisable to replace the hard drive as soon as possible to be safe.