All hard drives have a limited lifespan. It does not really matter if you use Solid State Drives or platter-based drives. Eventually, they will fail. It is therefore important to keep an eye on the status of hard drives. This gives you enough time to migrate the data to a new hard drive to avoid disaster.
Looking up hard drive usage information is also useful in other scenarios. Say you want to sell a hard drive. Buyers may want to know for how long the hard drive was used and how much writes it had. The latter is important for Solid State Drives, which support a limited number of writes.
One of the best applications for the job is Crystal Disk Info. The free software for Windows is easy to use. It displays internal hard drive data courtesy of S.M.A.R.T. — Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology — of hard drives.
S.M.A.R.T.’s primary purpose is to monitor and report drive reliability data. CrystalDiskInfo retrieves the information and displays them in its interface for each connected hard drive.
CrystalDiskInfo
You can download the latest version of CrystalDiskInfo from the developer’s website. Run the program after installation. It displays each hard drive in a tab in its interface.
Data of the primary hard drive is displayed automatically. Click on other hard drives to display their data in the interface.
Check the top right corner to get “total host reads”, “total host writes”, Total NAND writes”, “power on count” and “power on hours” information. These should give you a good view of the utilization of the drive.
Note that the information is slightly different for platter-based drives. These display the rotation rate, which is the speed more or less, as well as power on count and power on hours.
Additional information about the drive is displayed on the left side. You find the features that it supports there as well as the current transfer mode. This can also be useful to determine issues, e.g., if a drive is slow.
The app displays all S.M.A.R.T. values in a table below. Some, like the write error rate, temperature, or reallocated sectors count, may also be useful.
The current and worst values are displayed, as well as potential thresholds.
Closing Words
CrystalDiskInfo is a great app when it comes to hard drive information. It is free and easy to use. It is a good idea to check S.M.A.R.T. values regularly to detect failing hard drives as early as possible.
Now You: do you monitor S.M.A.R.T. values of hard drives?
I use the portable version from portableapps. My main reason for using it is to check the health of clients computer harddrives before doing anything else. A real time-saver when Crystaldisk right away starts beeping warning sounds, a quick screenshot sent to the customer telling them they need a new drive is a very common occurence. Excellent program.