How to Check Your Hard Drive's Health

Your hard drive hasn’t been acting the same lately. It’s starting to make clicking or screeching noises, it can’t seem to find your files, and it’s moving really slowly.

- WHITSON GORDON

Every hard drive dies eventually, and when it’s near death, you’ll see the signs: Strange noises, corrupted files, crashes during boot, and glacial transfer speeds all point to the inevitable end. This is normal, especially if your drive is more than a few years old. On older spinning drives, moving parts such as the motor can degrade over time, and a drive’s magnetic sectors can go bad.

Newer solid-state drives (SSDs) don’t have moving parts, but their storage cells degrade a little every time you write to them. That means they, too, will eventually fail (though SSD reliability is much better than it used to be).

Unless your drive experiences excessive heat or physical trauma, it’ll probably fail gradually. So even if your drive isn’t making strange noises, you should check its health once in a while—that way, you can prepare for death before it happens. Here’s how to do that.

Your computer can notify you before data loss occurs, and the drive can be replaced while it still remains functional.

CHECK YOUR DRIVE’S S.M.A.R.T. STATUS

Most modern drives have a feature called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), which monitors different drive attributes in an attempt to detect a failing disk. Your computer can notify you before data loss occurs, and the drive can be replaced while it still remains functional.

In Windows, you can manually check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your drives from the Command Prompt. Just type “cmd” into the search bar and open the application. In the pop-up box, run:

wmic diskdrive get model,status

If your drive’s death is imminent, it’ll return Pred Fail.