A few built-in checks can tell you if your hard drive or SSD is showing signs of problems.
Storage drives tend to fail when you least expect it. A traditional hard drive might alert you with clicks or squeaks, but an SSD has no moving parts to make a fuss. Problems with either type can manifest themselves as corrupted files, abnormally slow access, frequent read or write errors, crashes, or a drive that periodically disappears from Windows.
If this is already happening, back up your important files before doing anything else. Diagnostics are good, but it’s not as fun recovering the only copy of something when a drive fails.
Windows has several built-in methods for checking the status of disks, but the information it can provide varies depending on the computer’s hardware. Free utilities can go further and read SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data from the drive.
There is, however, a limit. A healthy state can be reassuring, but it is certainly not a lifetime guarantee.
Find out what Windows knows about your drive
The easiest way to start Windows 11 doesn’t involve opening a terminal or pretending to like command lines.
- Open Settings and choose System.
- Go to Storage > Advanced storage settings > Disks and volumes.
- Select your drive and choose Properties.
Windows can display the estimated remaining life, available capacity, and temperature of supported NVMe SSDs. It can also alert you if available capacity is low, reliability has decreased, or the drive has gone into read-only mode.
There is one thing to watch out for here. Microsoft says this health monitoring does not cover SATA SSDs or traditional hard drives. If Windows provides little or no health information, do not assume that it is in good health.
Another quick check can be done via PowerShell. Open a PowerShell tab in Windows Terminal, type Get-PhysicalDisk and check the HealthStatus column. The status can be Healthy, Warning, Unhealthy or Unknown.
Older guides may tell you to use wmic diskdrive get status instead, but that’s old advice. WMIC has been removed from currently supported versions of Windows 11 and Microsoft recommends supported alternatives such as PowerShell.
How to act in case of healthy, warning or bad results
If the result is Healthy and the PC is functioning normally, that’s a good sign. Continue to back up your data, as disk integrity systems can detect some potential problems, but not all failures.
For a second opinion, CrystalDiskInfo is a free tool capable of reading SMART data from many hard drives and SSDs, including NVMe drives. More importantly, for those who don’t really want to spend an afternoon trying to figure out what the raw storage counters mean, it gives the disk a Good, Caution, Bad, or Unknown health status.
If you get a Caution or Bad result, saving becomes the priority. You can then check the problem using the drive manufacturer’s diagnostic software, such as Seagate’s SeaTools or Samsung Magician (for supported Samsung SSDs). Persistent warnings, faulty output, or obvious mechanical symptoms are all good reasons to stop trusting that drive containing the only copy of important data and start considering a replacement.
CHKDSK is also useful, but for a different task. It checks a volume’s file system and metadata for errors. The /f option fixes file system errors and the /r option locates bad sectors and attempts to recover readable data.
However, if a file system problem is fixed with CHKDSK, the questionable hardware will not magically be made healthy. For hard drives, CrystalDiskInfo can trigger a warning state based on three SMART attributes: reassigned sectors, pending sectors, and uncorrectable sectors.
