How do I check a drives health and what to look out for?

IR76 · April 6

I think I know the basic command that checks a drives smart health where it says ok but I want to learn how to check details of a drives health and what to look for to get an idea of it's age or if there's a problem.

If there's any particular software you recommend please list it. Thank you very much.

TylerD321 · April 6

General drives: CrystalDiskInfo - https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/XP8K4RGX25G3GM?ocid=pdpshare

Samsung drives: Samsung Magician - https://www.samsung.com/us/memory-storage/magician-software/

Crucial drives: Crucial Storage Executive - https://www.crucial.com/support/ssd-support

Robchil · April 6

depending on drives.. samsung have samsung magician

in general i would use crystal diskinfo .. diskmark to performance test it

191x7 · April 6

17 minutes ago, IR76 said:

I think I know the basic command that checks a drives smart health where it says ok but I want to learn how to check details of a drives health and what to look for to get an idea of it's age or if there's a problem.

If there's any particular software you recommend please list it. Thank you very much.

On top of the mentioned tools I'd add Hard Disk Sentinel, HDTune and the tools in the Linux distro named Parted Magic.

porina · April 6

CrystalDiskInfo as a generic tool for checking drive SMART data. For hard disks, biggest warning signs are reallocated sectors and pending sectors.

However if you actually want to test a drive, then you can either go to the manufacturer's tools, or use HDDScan. I find that the easiest to use free tool to do a scan on any drive.

There's always a risk of bad areas on any storage device, which if the drive doesn't know about, it can't report it in SMART. If you suspect a disk at all, at a minimum do a full surface read then look at the SMART data again.