Controlling the status of our storage units , whether they are SSDs or hard drives, must be a priority for us as PC users. By doing so, we can avoid unexpected data loss due to drive failure. There are free programs that can help us avoid this situation and in this tutorial we are going to talk about them, which will help you check the health of your SSD or hard drive. Ready? So let’s go.
The problem of storage unit failures is usually a fairly complex solution for users, whether they are ordinary users or companies.
Free apps to check the health of your hard drive or SSD
A company can always resort to hiring the recovery of this data to another company specialized in this task. But these companies charge a lot of money for each GB of information recovered.
And, depending on the type of failure that the hard drive or SSD has, it is not always possible to recover all the stored data. To avoid this problem, we can resort to the use of free programs that can inform us of the status of our units. In the case of starting to detect problems in them, these programs can notify us sufficiently in advance so that we can replace the unit with a new backup one, and we can transfer all the information from the old one to the new one.
CrystalDisk Info, the best to check the health of your HDD or SSD?
This program has been developed by the same company that develops the popular benchmark for storage units, CrystalMark . The program will allow us to see, at a glance, all the information on each of our storage units, notifying us of their operating status and of possible failures that could occur shortly.
As a bonus, the program will also show the temperature data of our storage units. There are also interesting data here such as the firmware version, the SSD serial number, the read error rate. You can download the latest version of CrystalDisk Info from its website.
SSD Life Pro
This program is more focused on reading data from SSD drives . As such, it will only serve to give you a warning in the event that our unit begins to reach the limit of its useful life. In this case, the program will show you a warning of the problem, suggesting that you change the unit as soon as possible for a new one.
As you can see, in this case the program has detected a problem with our 512 GB Toshiba drive because most of the cells that the manufacturer has allocated to overprovisioning space, in order to carry out their wear leveling, are exhausted.
However, CrystalDisk Info has not detected this possible problem. In our case, it is most likely that we will prefer to opt for the most conservative option and proceed to replace this unit with a new one , to prevent any possible problem in the future.
You can download the SSDLife program from its website.
HWiNFO
Among the multiple functions that the hardware monitoring program, HWiNFO , allows, is that of reading the SMART of our hard drive and that of our SSD. The information you provide us may be interesting for the purpose of preventing problems.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the information is going to depend on everything the drive manufacturer allows to be seen, but at least it can tell us if the drive’s SMART thinks the drive is compromised.
In the case of SSDs, it will tell us the operational life that each unit has left. If you look at the Toshiba drive, which the SSDLife Pro previously recommended that we change as soon as possible, the HWiNFO tells us that the remaining operational life of this drive is only 40%, which confirms that it is time to change it for a new one.
You can download the latest version of the HWiNFO program from its website.
AIDA64 Extreme
It is undoubtedly one of the most complete software that can be found today, since the number of options and information it offers is unparalleled. To find the health status of our hard drive or SSD, all we have to do is download it from its website in its latest version, open the program and go to the storage section.
In it we have more options available that on the other hand are interesting, but the one we are looking for is again SMART
As we see in the upper screenshot, the data offered is very extensive. From temperature, drive lifetime remaining, write lifetime and of course total power on time. As if that were not enough, we have all the data and critical error rates as such, where unsafe system shutdowns, writing and reading data units or critical warnings stand out, among many others.
Hard Disk Sentinel
Here we have a more efficient monitoring software that works curiously better with SSDs than with HDDs. It is quite a powerful software that not only shows health status data and other adjacent data, but also allows us to repair some basic errors in our storage system and even perform performance tests.
These tests not only offer reading and writing data as such, but also inform us of something really interesting, such as the possible degradation of performance over time. All with a simple and accessible interface for any user. The downside is that we only have certain features in the free version, where for the rest we will have to opt for the paid version.
You can download this program from its website in its different versions, paid or free , even for MSDOS or Linux.
Intel Memory and Storage Tool
It is intended for Intel drives as such, but it also shows the health status of any SSD or HDD that we have in our PC.
The options are more open for the units of the brand, where we can have a greater number of options available, while for the rest everything remains in something merely informative such as the remaining life time, internal temperature, model, serial number , protocol or status.
And so far the software to check the health of your SSD or hard drive, which one do you prefer?
