How to Check Your Hard Drive's Health

 

It's a fact of life. Every hard drive dies eventually.

And when it's near death, you'll see the signs.

Strange noises, corrupted files, crashing during boot,

and glacial transfer speeds all point to the inevitable end.

Solid state drives, or SSDs, don't have moving parts

but their storage cells do degrade a little bit

every time you write to them -- meaning, they too

will eventually fail, although SSD reliability

is much better than it used to be.

Even if you're not hearing strange noises coming from it,

it's important to check in on your hard drive's health

every now and then to see how it's doing.

First, check your hard drive's S.M.A.R.T. status.

S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis

and Reporting Technology.

It's a feature that monitors different drive attributes

in an attempt to detect a failing disk.

That way, your computer will automatically notify you

before data loss occurs and the drive can be replaced

while it still remains functional.

To check your drive's health on 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 popup box, run the following.

And if everything worked out, there should be words

on the screen right now and you should type them in.

It will return Pred Fail if your drive's death is imminent

or OK if it thinks the drive is doing fine.

For a more detailed reading of your drives,

the CrystalDiskInfo for Windows, it's free,

or DriveDx for macOS, which is $20 with a free trial,

these will both offer a more detailed S.M.A.R.T. information

than your computer provides on its own.

However, drives with Caution or Pred Fail readings

won't necessarily fail tomorrow.

They could chug along for a year or two

or be dead as a doornail in a week.

But if you're getting warnings,

it's time to back up your files

before your drive kicks the bucket.

Now, it's not time for a full backup though.

You don't want to stress the drive with too many reads

or it could fail while you're backing it up.

Copy just the most important files to an external drive.

Then do a full drive clone with something like

EaseUS Todo Backup Free on Windows

or Carbon Copy Cloner on Mac.

In the end, it's not a matter of if your drive

will fail but when.

All hard drives fail eventually.

And if you want to avoid losing your important files,

you absolutely have to back up your computer regularly,

including when the drive is healthy.

I know, you've heard all this before

but are you actually doing it?

The good news is you have options,

from Backblaze to Mac's built-in Time Machine feature,

cloud-based backup is worth it