A Tool to Predict Hard Drive Failures

Posted on: October 16th, 2009

I just recently run into a smart little program that I had also chance to test on several good and several failed hard drives.

It’s called Crystal Disk Info. It’s also a free software. You can download it from: http://download.cnet.com/CrystalDiskInfo/3000-2086_4-10832082.html (Note on installation: the new versions of this software will try to load additional trial software during the installation, please read through the screens during the installation and uncheck the options to prevent installing the unnecessary software).

The software extracts and analyzes the data collected by the sensors and hardware of the hard drive. This diagnostic feature is called SMART which is some kind of long acronym but nearly every hard drive has it (Unfortunately Windows does not have a built-in monitoring for hard drives.)

After installing and starting it you get a screen like this:

The above is a good hard drive

This one is one that’s starting to fail.

Now that’s a lot of numbers and information. Honestly, I don’t even know what they mean.

Fortunately, you don’t need to know it either. The important information is the health status. So far this program was 100% correct in pinpointing failing hard drives. If the hard drive has an issue you’ll have a “warning” under the health status and the things turns yellow from blue. Quite noticeable.

Another thing that you might want to check is overheating. The temperature is in Celsius originally but you can switch to Farenheit (in the menu select Function → Temperature type). Temperatures above 50° C, or 120° F are too high – except for some high RPM models.

I’d highly recommend checking on the health of your hard drive once a week, or keep this program running in the background (in the menu select Function → Resident, & Function → Startup)

One more addition: External Hard drives can go bad too. Crystaldiskinfo is able to check the diagnostic of these too. Actually, the second picture above is showing a diagnostics of a hard drive connected externally to my computer.

If you use check on your hard drives regularly then you have a good chance to act before you’d lose data.

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