98 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2020HERE’S HOW CHECK YOUR HARD DRIVE’S HEALTH
drop of a laptop, or a sudden move of a
desktop tower, and the drive can be
irreparably damaged. Wait long enough,
however, and the drive will just fail on its own.
That’s why hard drives need closer
monitoring than a solid state drive, which has
no moving parts. They die too, but usually not
under the same conditions. If you’re thinking
about using an SSD as your primary boot
drive, check out our roundup of the best
SSDs (go.pcworld.com/bsds).
While you can’t always predict when or
how your hard drive will bite the dust, you can
take a few steps to see it coming.GET SMART
The first tool for keeping tabs on a hard
drive is its Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and
Reporting Technology, or SMART, feature.
This system is built into most modern hard
drives and SSDs, and it’s designed to report
when your drive is failing or encountering
issues. Drive manufacturers can take theirAn example of WMIC in action.own approaches to SMART, but they
generally measure similar performance
points such as read error rates, mechanical
shock, hard-disk temperature, seek time
performance, and so on.
Most of the time the SMART system works
in the background, but you can bring it to the
fore in a number of ways.
The simplest way is to use the Windows
command line utility WMIC, which stands for
Windows Management Instrumentation
Command-line (utility). This basic tool is a
simple yay/nay health result based on the
SMART statistics. Open a Windows command
prompt and enter the following: wmic
diskdrive get model,status.
The results should look something like in
the image below. It’s preferable to ask for the
model as well as status so that you can
determine more quickly which drive is failing
if a problem is reported. This is not so much
an issue for laptops, but it’s helpful for
desktops with multiple drives.