Is your computer making unusual noises (like grinding, clicking, or loud humming), showing frequent Blue Screen of Death errors, or system crashes? Moreover, are you experiencing slow system boot times or file access, corrupted files or folders, disappearing files or folders, sudden PC overheating, frequent bad sectors, or disk errors? Then, it is best to perform a comprehensive disk health check.
An SSD or hard disk health check is a significant step you can take to prevent all these issues, which may be responsible for data loss, degraded system speed and responsiveness, short drive lifespan, loss of data, and data corruption.
Hence, this article guides you through the best ways to check hard disk health and the health of your SSD to help you prevent data loss, maintain system performance, extend drive lifespan, avoid premature drive replacements or expensive data recovery services, and ensure data integrity. Let us dive right into them without wasting your precious time.
The following sections explain the most suitable methods you can follow to check SSD and HDD health on your computer.
CHDSK or Check Disk Utility scans your hard disk and creates a report, or scans your disk to fix bad sectors and file errors. Below is how to use this utility to check hard disk health on Windows.
Disk Management is a Windows disk space analyzer function that gives you information about all the hard drives connected to the server. Moreover, it helps you determine your HDD health. Below is the step-by-step way to use it.
Also know: How to Fix High Memory Usage in Windows 11
All modern drives come equipped with SMART technology (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). It is an automatic hard drive monitoring and SSD failure detection system that alerts you to issues it detects with your drives. You can follow these steps to check HDD health using the SMART tool.
Note: If you wish to see the detailed hard disk health check report, you can type wmic /namespace:\\root\wmi path MSStorageDriver_ATAPISmartData in Command Prompt and press Enter to view the detailed attributes for all your drives.
Windows also boasts a built-in error-checking tool to perform a disk health check. Below is the complete process to use it.
Windows PowerShell allows a more powerful SMART status check for your HDD health. Below is how to use it.
Also know: Best Free Cache Cleaner Software for Windows 10 and 11 PC
Windows boasts a Defragment & Optimize Drive tool that allows you to check your SSD disk health by following the steps below.
Windows settings offer an option to perform an SSD health check. It helps you find details such as the available SSD space, temperature, etc., through these steps.
Another way to perform an SSD disk health check is through the Command Prompt. Below is how to check SSD health in this way.
Windows PowerShell lets you check the SSD disk health by showing you the disk status, statistics of use, and SSD warning signs. Below is how to use Windows PowerShell to perform an SSD disk health check.
Also know: Best Free PC Cleaner and Optimizer for Windows 10, 11
That is all for how to perform an HDD and SSD disk health check. You can follow any method you are most comfortable with from the guide above to check the health of your disk to catch potential issues early, prevent data loss, and ensure your system functions smoothly. However, if you have any related doubts, questions, or concerns, you can leave a comment for experts to help you in whichever way possible.
While Windows updates generally solve problems, they may sometimes lead to errors like Driver PNP…
EasyCAP software, a USB device, became immensely popular over the past decade. You can use…
HEIC is a popular image format. However, many times, you may need to convert HEIC…
Do you miss how fast your computer performed when you first unboxed it? What happened…
Do you remember how fast your computer was when it was new? It could complete…
Many users duplicate Word documents to secure a backup, avoid overwrites or accidental deletions in…