Good afternoon, dear readers and viewers of the site channel, for sure each of you at least once in your life faced the problem of data loss, and I'm now talking not about accidental deletion, but about the failure of the device on which you had important information, in computers and laptops these are hard drives or solid-state ssd, and today I want to tell you how to check the health of a hard drive in Windows 10 redstone.
Hard disk health
Let's first define what is included in the concept of hard drive health> each hard drive or solid state drive has some parameters that are responsible for the functioning of a particular component, and they are calculated by such threshold values, upon reaching which the device fails. These threshold values are called smart status, I talked about them in detail in one of the previous articles, when I raised the issue of monitoring the status of RAID arrays.
Most programs for determining the health of a hard disk use exactly the indicators of s.m.a.r.t counters and, based on them, already give you a result. I want to note that, unlike solid-state ssd disks, hdd can also have mechanical damage, for example, damage to the head when the disk is dropped or violently shaken, for more details about the device of the hdd disk, see the link on the left.
I want to note that ssd media do not have such mechanical problems as hdd, due to their architecture, and their smart performance may differ, on this topic I already wrote you a post on how to increase the service life of ssd, by an order of magnitude, although there is already minimal declared 5 years.
Let's move from theory to practice and consider software products that will help you diagnose hdd and ssd media.
Software for diagnostics health hdd
CrystalDiskInfo Utility
The CrystalDiskInfo program, in my opinion, should be the first tool in diagnosing your hard drive. I think it will not be difficult for you to download it, on the Internet. I am using the portable version.
When you run CrystalDiskInfo 6.7.5, it will start hard disk health check, this procedure takes a couple of seconds, the results of which will give you the following table.
The first thing you need to pay attention to is the item Technical condition, as you can see for me this alarm is indicated in yellow. Below you will see smart counters, which show you possible problems. Let's see what kind of information you get about your HDD and SSD:
- Model and size of your disk
- Firmware number
- Connection interface
- Data transfer mode
- Logical letter
- Spindle speed
- Number of hdd inclusions
- Total working time (useful if you bought a hdd from someone and they tell you that it is new)
Below is a table of smart indicators of the hard drive, showing the current values and thresholds, after which it can already break. As you can see, I have the Reassigned Sectors parameter, it starts to show that it is worth paying attention to, this parameter is used as sectors that go to replace bad sectors, some kind of spare reserve for the hard disk to replace bad sectors.
I want to note that there is a set of smart indicators for ssd and hard drives, since these are different technologies.
You can configure the CrystalDiskInfo program to start automatically when the computer is turned on, and then it will check the health of the hard disk at a certain interval and report any changes if anything happens.
Click Tools> Autostart, now CrystalDiskInfo will always load.
I also advise you to put the Agent Launch (in the Windows notification area), for each individual disk there will be its own icon that immediately displays the temperature.
You yourself can set in CrystalDiskInfo by what method the problem with the health of the hard disk will be reported to you. Choose from Sound notifications, event logging, and e-mail.
In the paragraph of the schedule, you can set what will be the interval between the new hdd health check, by default it is 10 minutes, but I think that once every 3 or 6 hours is enough.
Summarizing the CrystalDiskInfo utility, we can safely say that it is able to diagnose and promptly notify the user about problems with the hard drive.
Hard Disk Sentinel Utility
We continue our acquaintance with the programs that check the health of hdd, and the next step is Hard Disk Sentinel, I will immediately note the utility is also paid, but on the Internet it is easy to find with a key, the root tracker will help you.
We start Hard Disk Sentinel, than this utility, it is good, it shows in addition to the state of hdd and ssd, and also RAID arrays. You will also receive a list of your hdd or ssd media. As you can see, one of them has a health of 21 percent, swears at bad sectors, which have been replaced by reassignment sectors.
The next tab is temperature, here you can see both the current values and the maximum.
The most interesting is the S.M.A.R.T. in Hard Disk Sentinel, based on it, you can understand the health of the hard disk, I remind you that hdd and ssd have different smarts.
And I find the Info tab useful, here you can see all the summary data, about the versions and firmware of the hard drive.
The Hard Disk Sentinel utility also allows you to carry out tests to diagnose the health of the hard disk, an example can be a new or old hard drive. To do this, click the Noise Control Configuration icon.
Here, which is cool, you can set the noise level, but you reduce the performance of hdd. Press the Head Approach test.
Testing the hdd head will start.
But in order to look for bad sectors or bad sectors, we select the hdd surface test, with this test you can precisely understand the health of the hard disk.
The testing time depends on the size of the hard disk, the larger it is, the longer you will wait.
It is also possible to check s.m.a.r.t. through the Internet.
From the settings, I can advise you to set up mail in addition to sound notifications.
Victoria utility
The next utility for us will be Victoria. It has a version for both Windows and ISO for dos, when you do not have an operating system, and you need to find out the health of your hard drive.
Download Victoria:
- Windows version Victoria (https://yadi.sk/d/FFYm9bWVumJjX)
- Dos version (https://yadi.sk/d/XefKZqDuumJmm)
We start the Windows version. On the standart tab, you will see a list of your hard drives. We select the desired one and see the summary information.
The SMART tab gives you the most important hard drive health counters. To do this, press the Get SMART button.
Go to the test tab, here we choose what to do with the broken sectors, the default is ignore, that is, I advise you to install Remap, that is, try to reassign. Then click start.
After that, the health check of the hdd will begin, you need to turn to sectors to access which takes more than 600 milliseconds.
I remind you that the Victoria utility has a dos version, which is useful when you do not have an operating system installed on your laptop or server, but you need to check the status of hdd. We make a bootable USB flash drive utility WinSetupFromUSB
Booting into Victoria, we select the version for a regular computer or for a laptop.
Press the F1 key to view the available functions, we are primarily interested in the P key. Selecting the channel with the tested HDD.
Choose Primary Master.
Press F2 and testing begins, according to the results of which you can draw a conclusion about the health of the hard disk.
In fact, there are still a lot of utilities, but these have always been enough for me in my practice.
