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Reading A Drive's Health Report Before It Fails
Every hard disk and SSD made in the last twenty years keeps a diary about itself. How many hours it has run, how hot it has been, how many sectors it has had to retire, how many times it has struggled to read. This record is called S.M.A.R.T. and the drive updates it constantly. Almost nobody reads it, which is a pity, because a hard drive health check takes less than a minute and most failures announce themselves weeks ahead.
Where To Find It
Open DRE Pro and look at Drives And Locations. Every drive in the list shows a health percentage next to its name, read from the drive's own report. Click a drive and open Drive Health for the full picture. There is nothing to install and nothing is written to the drive.
What The Numbers Mean
- Health percentage and status. Healthy, Warning or Failing, worked out from the drive's own values. This is the one number to watch over time.
- Temperature. Hard disks like to stay under about 45 degrees. Sustained heat shortens their life and often points to a dusty laptop or a dead fan.
- Power-on time. How long the drive has actually run. A desktop disk at 30,000 hours has done more than three years of solid work.
- Power cycles. How many times it has been switched on. A very high count on an external disk points to a loose connection that keeps dropping it.
- Data written and wear level, on SSDs. Flash cells wear out with writes. The wear level is the drive's own estimate of how much life is left.
- A read test. DRE Pro reads from the drive to confirm it actually answers, because a drive can report fine values and still fail to read.
The S.M.A.R.T. Values That Matter Most
Not every drive reports every value. Where one is missing, DRE Pro says Not Available instead of inventing a number. The smart drive information behind the percentage is a table of attributes, and most of them you can ignore. A handful tell you nearly everything. Reallocated Sector Count is the number of bad sectors the drive has quietly swapped for spares. Zero is normal. Anything rising month to month is a drive on its way out. Current Pending Sector Count is sectors the drive could not read and is waiting to retry. Uncorrectable Error Count is reads that failed outright. On any of these, a small number that stays still is a tired drive. A number that climbs is a failing one.
DRE Pro shows the values read and whether each is within its normal range, so you do not need to know the thresholds by heart.
Drive Failing Signs You Can Notice Yourself
- The computer freezes for several seconds when opening a folder, then carries on as if nothing happened.
- Copying a large file slows to a crawl partway through, every time, at roughly the same place.
- Files that opened last month now say they are corrupted.
- Windows runs CHKDSK on its own at start-up more than once.
- A clicking, ticking or grinding sound, or a disk that spins up, stops and spins up again.
- An external disk that disconnects and reconnects on its own.
What To Do With A Warning
Any of those drive failing signs together with a Warning in Drive Health is a drive asking for a backup this week, not this quarter.
- Back up anything on the drive that you do not already have elsewhere. Do this first, before any test or repair.
- Do not run defragment, CHKDSK with repair or any optimise tool. These write to the drive and stress it.
- If files are already missing, do not scan the drive directly. Use Make An Image Of A Drive to copy it once to a healthy drive and run Scan This Image on the copy.
- Replace the drive. A Warning rarely goes back to Healthy.
Make It A Habit
Check Drive Health once a month. A drive that reads 100, then 96, then 89 over three months is telling you its plans. The report is free and it is already on the drive. All you have to do is look.