Use S.M.A.R.T Test on HDD to Monitor Disk Health

What is S.M.A.R.T test?

Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, often written as S.M.A.R.T, is a monitoring system incorporated in PC HDD and SSD. Its primary duty is to identify and report numerous signs of drive dependability to predict impending hardware breakdowns.

When S.M.A.R.T. data shows that a drive is about to fail, software running on the host system may warn the user so that preventive action can be taken to avoid data loss, and the failing drive can be replaced while data integrity is preserved.

How to run S.M.A.R.T test on HDD

There are 2 ways to run S.M.A.R.T test on your disks to check the disk health.

Way 1. Use Command Prompt to run S.M.A.R.T test

CMD allows users to adjust the PC and deal with complicated drive problems, such as converting the disk to GPT, resizing the partition, formatting the disk partition, changing the drive letter, etc. Here we’ll use commands to perform the S.M.A.R.T test on HDD.

Step 1. Click the "Windows" button and input "cmd" in the taskbar, then select "Run as administrator".

Step 2. In the CMD window, input "wmic diskdrive get status" and press "Enter".

Step 3. If you see "OK", the target hard drive is healthy. When you see "Pred Fail", there may be errors on the hard drive.

Way 2. Employ third- a party tool to easily check S.M.A.R.T test

Some third-party tools can also run S.M.A.R.T test. AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is one of them, a free disk and partition management tool for Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP system.

When you run this tool, it will automatically read the disk information checked by S.M.A.R.T. to warn users that their hard disk may need to deeply check. Users will see the health status of the disks. And if there’s something wrong, this tool will show details and offer you advice to inform you back up important data or change a new disk if the disk is failing.

Moreover, this tool also has a “Disk Speed Test” feature to test hard drive reading/writing speed.

Step 1. Download and install this hard drive S.M.A.R.T. test software. Once it detects that the disk health status of one hard drive is poor, a red exclamation mark will be displayed on the disk icon. You can also right-click the target drive, and click "Properties" and "Health (SMART)".

Step 2: There are 3 states of hard disk health.

State one: Good
The disk is in good condition and can be used with confidence.

State two: Caution
Except for the temperature, one or more attributes are close to the threshold. The disk still can be used normally, but it is recommended to back up the disk regularly.

State three: Bad
One or more attributes are equal to or less than the threshold. The disk may be damaged soon and cause data loss. It is recommended to clone this disk and replace it with a new one.

You can click "View details" to see specific S.M.A.R.T. values, red text indicates that the value of the item is equal to or exceeds the threshold.

What-to-do after S.M.A.R.T disk check

If you find your hard drive is healthy, congratulations, your disk is safe. However, if your test result shows “Caution” or “Bad”, there are some measures you might need to do before everything is too late.

Option 1. Check all partitions on HDD

The first factor we need to realize is bad sectors. The bad sector refers to the place where data cannot be written on the hard drive tracks. If these bad sectors are not repaired in time, the hard drive won't successfully read the disk, and your PC may confront the BSOD issue. AOMEI Partition Assistant can help you check your partitions via CHKDSK. exe.

Step 1. Right-click the drive you decide to check and click "Check Partition".

Step 2. There're three methods to check the partition, click the "Check partition and fix errors in this partition by using chkdsk.exe" and "OK" in order.

Step 3. Click "OK" when the bad sectors on the target hard drive are repaired.

Option 2. Defrag HDD

If you perform the disk speed test and find the HDD speed can be improved. Then, you can use the “Disk Defrag” function to improve hard drive performance.

Step 1. Right-click on the drive and click "Disk Defrag".

Step 2. Select the partition on the target hard drive and click "Analyze".

Step 3. In the new window, check the target drive and click "Defrag".

Step 4. It will defrag the disk, please wait patiently.

Option 3. Change a new disk

However, if your computer has already crashed frequently, or is stuck during the boot, you might need to start to find a new disk for your PC. A failing disk will show some tractable signs like overheating, corrupted data files, etc.

Some users may not know how to replace the disk on the PC. In fact, you only need to find a suitable disk, plug it into your PC, initialize it, and transfer all old data to the new disk. The most important part is the cloning disk.

If you don’t want to lose all data and reinstall the system, cloning the disk is the best option. To clone an old disk, you just need to upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional to unlock the “Disk Clone Wizard” function which can clone HDD/SSD/USB/SD Card to another one with a few clicks.

Note: The Professional Edition also supports only clone Windows system, you can keep the current Windows system and your personal settings on your new disk.

Step 1. After connecting the new hard drive to your PC, then click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select another drive as the destination disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of the SSD. 

Step 5. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

To sum up

Running S.M.A.R.T test on HDD can not only monitor your disk health but also prevent data loss raised by hard disk failure. Besides the mentioned functions of AOMEI Partition Assistant, this tool has “App Mover”, “Allocate Free Space”, “NTFS and FAT32 Convertor”, and so on functions. And you can choose the Server Edition if you’re using Windows Server 2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)/2003.