SEPTEMBER 2020 PCWorld 99CRYSTALDISKINFO
If you’d like something with a little
more detail, then another option
is to use CrystalDiskInfo (go.
pcworld.com/crys). CDI is a free
desktop program that can display
a lot of information about your
disks, but the top area is probably
enough for most people.
Here, CDI displays a status for
each drive, using a color-coding
system: Good (blue), Caution
(yellow), Bad (red), and Unknown
(gray). Most of the time you
should just see a Good status, but
if you see one of the others it’s
time to keep an eye on that drive.
But here’s the thing about
checking the SMART status: It’s not 100
percent reliable. Consider a Google study
published in 2007 (go.pcworld.com/st07):
The authors found that 36 percent of the
drives monitored for the study reported no
SMART issues at all before failing.
Things haven’t changed much either. In
2016, Backblaze reported that it was seeing
23.3 percent of its data center drives failing
(go.pcworld.com/23pc) without reporting
issues from the five SMART attributes it tracks.
Statistically speaking, the majority of discs
do report SMART issues before failing;
however, statistics become less reliable when
trying to predict the fate of a single drive. In
other words, your particular drive might
report issues before failing, or it might not.
SMART is also a part of SSDs, but it has the
same drawbacks and limitations as hard
drives. The best solution right now for SSDs is
to use monitoring tools provided by the drive
maker such as Crucial’s Storage Executive,
WD’s SSD Dashboard, or Samsung’s
Magician Software (for EVO 860 and up).BEYOND SMART
While SMART is a useful tool for monitoring
your drive’s health, you should also keep an
eye on how your drive behaves and sounds. If
you start to hear a grinding noise emanating
from your PC (go.pcworld.com/grns), for
example, that is most likely the hard drive.CrystalDiskInfo 8.6.2 showing the status of a WD hard drive.