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Hard drives use S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) to gauge their own reliability and determine if they’re failing.

You can view your hard drive’s S.M.A.R.T. Data and see if it has started to develop problems.Hard drives don’t live forever, and you often can’t see the end coming. Fortunately, most modern drives support S.M.A.R.T., so they can at least do some basic self-monitoring. Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t have an easy-to-use built-in tool that shows your hard disk’s S.M.A.R.T.

You can view a very basic S.M.A.R.T. Status from the Command Prompt, but to really see this information, you’ll need to grab a third-party app. Check S.M.A.R.T. Status with CrystalDiskInfoRELATED:is an easy-to-use, open-source program that can shows the S.M.A.R.T.

Status details reported by your hard drives. You can download an installable or —the choice is up to you.Once you’ve got CrystalDiskInfo running, it’s a pretty straightforward app. The main view shows the S.M.A.R.T. Status information for your hard drives. If everything is working properly, you should see the status “Good “ displayed. In the image below, just under the menu bar, you can see that all three drives in our system report a “Good” status and you can even view the temperature of each drive.

Other statuses you might see include “Bad” (which usually indicates a drive that’s dead or near death), “Caution” (which indicates a drive that you should most likely be thinking about backing up and replacing), and “Unknown” (which just means that S.M.A.R.T. Information could not be obtained).You can also view a list of detailed information about each drive, but unless you’re a pro—or you’re troubleshooting something very specific—it likely won’t mean much to you. If you’re interested, though, the maintains a pretty good list of these attributes, along with how they can be interpreted.There’s really not a lot more to the app, but there is one other feature worth pointing out. If you are particularly concerned about the health of a drive, you can set CrystalDiskInfo to start with Windows and run as a background app. While it’s running this way, CrystalDiskInfo will send a notification to alert you if the S.M.A.R.T. Status of any drive changes. Just open the “Function” menu and toggle both the “Resident” and “Startup” options on.

Check S.M.A.R.T. Status at the Command PromptYou can also view a very basic S.M.A.R.T. Status from the Windows Command Prompt.

To open the Command Prompt, hit Start, type “Command Prompt,” and then press Enter.A the prompt, type (or copy and paste) the following command, and then press Enter: wmic diskdrive get statusIf everything is working properly, you should see the status “OK” displayed for each hard drive on your system. Other statuses—such as “Bad,” “Caution,” or “Unknown”—can indicate problems with your drive or errors retrieving S.M.A.R.T. Help, My Hard Drive Is Dying!If the S.M.A.R.T. Status indicates that you have an error, it does not necessarily mean that your hard drive is going to fail immediately. However, if there’s a S.M.A.R.T. Error, it would be wise to assume that your hard drive is in the process of failing.

A complete failure could come in a few minutes, a few months, or—in some cases—even a few years. However long it takes, you should not trust the hard drive with your data in the meantime.Ensure you have stored on another media, such as an external hard drive or optical discs. Obviously, this is good advice whether you know the S.M.A.R.T. Status of your drives or not. Problems—including drive failure—can happen at any time, and without warning.

With your files properly backed up, you should look into replacing your hard drive as soon as possible. You simply cannot consider a hard drive that fails a S.M.A.R.T. Test to be reliable. Even if your hard drive doesn’t die completely, it could corrupt portions of your data. You might also consider using the in Windows to diagnose and repair any related problems that it can.RELATED:Of course, hardware isn’t perfect—hard drives can fail without any S.M.A.R.T. However, S.M.A.R.T.

Can give you some advance warning when a hard drive isn’t performing the way it should.Image Credit: Flickr.

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The S.M.A.R.T. Way to predict hard disk failureThe worst thing about hard disk failure - apart from losing any file we didn't have a backup of - is that it will often come out of the blue.Sometimes we might hear clicking sounds from the drive, or get file/folder related error messages. Most of the time, though, the drive will seem to work just fine, and we get a BSOD on the next reboot or a message like that.It's good then that there is a system that can statistically predict hard drive failure.

Its name is Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T) and it is part of any hard drive that has been manufactured the past decade.The S.M.A.R.T protocol was developed by IBM, Seagate, Quantum, Conner, and Western Digital in 1995, based on an earlier system by IBM. It measures key characteristics of the HDD, such as the read error rate, reallocated sectors, seek error rate, etc. Which can be used to predict hard disk failure. Unfortunately, even though there have been more than half a dozen of Windows versions since 1995, not one of them can read the S.M.A.R.T data, probably for licensing reasons.So, we need to use external software to monitor S.M.A.R.T and our hard drive's health.

And CrystalDiskInfo is one of the best such programs. Download and Install CrystalDiskInfoWe will find the latest version of CrystalDiskInfo atIt's best to download the portable version because it can run without an installation, and it also doesn't feature third-party apps, like the full CrystalDiskInfo installer.After we download the.zip file, we 'Extract all' of its content.and run the DiskInfo application. DiskInfoX64 is for 64-bit Windows, and DiskInfo is for 32-bit Windows.How CrystalDiskInfo predicts Hard Disk FailureThe first time we run the application, it will immediately show us the S.M.A.R.T.

Status for all of our hard drives.If the 'Health Status' is 'Good', the disk is probably OK.On the bottom half of the main application Window, we will see all the fifteen different metrics CrystalDiskInfo takes into consideration, to predict hard drive failure.Some of them are simple statistics, such as the Start/Stop Count, the Power-On Hours, or the Power Cycle Count. Others are more serious metrics, like the Reallocated Sectors Count.or the Read Error Rate.As you understand, having a 'Caution' or a 'Bad' health status can predict imminent hard drive failure.

How to read and interpret CrystalDiskInfo dataWhile the Health Status is loud and clear, and pretty easy to understand, the rest of the data can be daunting for a beginner.This, however, is easy to fix. First we go to Function - Advanced Feature - Raw Values and select 10DEC.After that, we completely disregard the 'Current', 'Worst' and 'Threshold' columns, and only look at the raw values.In the above example, the Reallocated Sectors Count is 0, not 100 or 10.Reallocated sectors are one of the most severe conditions for a hard drive. A single sector isn't the messenger of a complete hard disk failure by itself.

But if the sectors are multiplying, it's a sure sign that something is wrong.From the rest of the metrics, if one deserves our attention, CrystalDiskInfo will change its color to yellow for caution or red if it is bad.If we have a couple of 'cautions' but not enough to affect the disk's health status, we should just keep an eye on them. In such a case, it's a good idea to run CrystalDiskInfo once or twice a week to see if there is any change. Should I panic if I get a Caution or Bad health status?We must always keep in mind that CrystalDiskInfo cannot read the future. The best it does is statistical predictions, based on the S.M.A.R.T. Data.In other words, there have been hard drives with 'Caution' that continued working flawlessly for years, and 'Good' hard drives that failed the next day.So, we must not rush to replace a hard drive with a 'Caution' health status. Instead, we should take a full backup of any essential files, which is something we should be doing on every hard drive, even the 'Good' ones.If however we get a 'Caution' or a 'Bad' health status, we should follow-up with a full disk scan, that could potentially discover deeper problems with the hard drive. On a future guide, we will cover the best disk checking software.Stay tuned!

Do you suspect an imminent Disk Failure for one of your hard drives?If you have a caution or bad health status, and want a second opinion, you can leave us a comment with a screenshot of your CrystalDiskInfo results. Support PCstepsDo you want to support PCsteps, so we can post high quality articles throughout the week?You can like our, share this post with your friends, and select our affiliate links for your purchases on or.If you prefer your purchases from China, we are affiliated with the largest international e-shops:.

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