Greetings!
The hard drive is subject to natural wear and tear during its operation, and the larger the amount of data it processes daily, the faster its condition deteriorates. An important role in this is played by working in unfavorable conditions - an insufficiently efficient cooling system and, as a result, excessive overheating of the hard drive. You can read about what temperature is comfortable for a hard drive.
Ultimately, bad (bad) sectors may appear on the hard drive, it may begin to exhibit instability: it may not be detected when turned on, disappear from the system, display files and folders with unreadable characters (hieroglyphs and gibberish).
To avoid losing all the data on your hard drive overnight, you need to monitor its current state. For this purpose, diagnostic utilities have been created, thanks to which you can check the “health” of the hard drive.
How to assess the condition of a hard drive
When assessing the condition of a hard drive, utilities specially created for this purpose are usually guided by both their own algorithms and those obtained directly from the S.M.A.R.T. hard drive itself. options.
S.M.A.R.T.– this technology is responsible for monitoring dozens of parameters that are monitored in real time during drive operation. Based on these data, a verdict is made about the “health” of the hard drive. If S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics reveals errors in the operation of the drive, this indicates its imminent failure.
Now let's look at a few solutions that will help determine the current status of your hard drive(s).
HDD Health utility
A very functional free utility for determining the status of a hard drive. The functionality of this solution includes a convenient visual display of the temperature and health status of the connected hard drive.
In addition, it is possible to view the technical parameters of the drive and all the functions it supports. If desired, it is possible to configure alerts about changes in the state of the connected hard drive(s).
The only disappointment is the lack of support for the Russian language, which can make mastering the program slightly more difficult.
HDDlife Pro utility
A convenient and visual program designed to monitor the status of the hard drive(s). A fairly well-thought-out interface and support for the Russian language play an important role in this.
The utility analyzes disk parameters and monitors their changes. It is possible to configure alerts when certain problems occur with the drive.
It should be noted that in free, fully functional mode, the program works for exactly 14 days, and after that, constant monitoring becomes unavailable.
Brief summary
As you can see, even a novice user can control the “health” of a hard drive. Thanks to the solutions described in the article, you will always be aware of the status of the hard drive, you will be able to make a backup copy in time if the hard drive begins to fail, thereby preserving valuable personal data that was accumulated while working at the computer.
If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comments.