How to Check If Your Hard Drive Is Failing
Windows: I recently had a suspicion that something was wrong with my hard drive. After spending a little time figuring out what was going on and making sure nothing really bad was happening, I saved over $ 200 or the cost of a shiny new 6TB hard drive (or a faster 2TB SSD) which I was going to order from Amazon.
Testing your hard drive’s capabilities sounds like an exciting way to pass the day, but don’t let my sarcasm fool you. It doesn’t take long to do a few tests, and it’s actually refreshing to confirm that everything is working the same as it did back when you got your year-old drive (or PC). And of course, the best feeling is to save money by not buying unnecessary upgrades.
Symptoms
I use multiple SSDs on my desktop, except for one 3TB hard drive that holds all of my games, disk backups, Nine Inch Nails bootlegs , and other giant files. Over the course of several weeks, I’ve noticed that Steam updates for the various games on this disc – heavier players like Stellaris or The Elder Scrolls Online – have been struggling to do something. Downloads will creep even though I have a fairly strong internet connection. Progress bars for installing patches will be delayed by an hour.
Even worse, launching any Steam update for one of these powerful games will slow down everything I wish I could do with that hard drive. There are no backups. No file transfer. No disk space analysis . Zilch.
While this sounds like a Steam issue – or at least an issue with how updates for certain games are deployed – I was concerned that my hard drive was finally starting to deteriorate. I didn’t hear the horrible click of death , but I was so annoyed by the horrible performance that I began to wonder how much it would cost to upgrade to a faster HDD or larger SSD once and for all.
Before pulling the trigger, I wanted to run some tests to see if my hard drive was really at fault.
Chkdsk is your friend
The first and simplest thing you can try is to use chkdsk to look for filesystem errors – assuming you don’t run into major stability issues with your disk (or the aforementioned click of death ). You will want to do more to get a complete picture of how your drive is performing, but running chkdsk is a great first step to see if something is wrong.
Open File Explorer, right-click the drive and select Properties. Go to the Tools tab and click Check in the Error Checking section.
Even though Windows probably didn’t find any errors in your drive’s file system with a normal scan, you can run your own scan manually to be sure. It shouldn’t take long, but I wouldn’t trust the progress bar – mine stayed “20 seconds left” longer, but it didn’t take more than a minute or so to complete.
This process starts a simple check disk or chkdsk read-only file system scan of your drive. You can get a little wilder if you have extra time to kill. Open an elevated Command Prompt by searching for Command Prompt in the Start menu and then right-clicking and choosing Run as Administrator.
Then, at the command prompt, you’ll want to type ‘chkdsk followed by the letter of the drive you want to scan, as well as / f (to have Windows automatically fix any file system errors it finds) or / r (to have Windows scan the entire disk surface for bad sectors , which may take a long time, but is more applicable to your actual hardware.)
If you have to reboot your system to run chkdsk, be sure to look at the results in Windows Event Viewer – it might help you figure out if something in your drive deserves a deeper look.
Grow wiser
This acronym, short for Self Monitoring, Analyzing and Reporting Technology, is a small system built into every drive you purchase. It tracks and records various data points about your drive, which you can use to look for warning signs at any time. The caveat here is that looking at the SMART report will provide you with a lot of data that you might not understand, but there are (thankfully) many applications that can demystify numbers and provide tangible advice.
First, let’s take a look at a typical SMART report. To do this, I use the free HDDScan application, which makes it incredibly easy to see what’s going on with your drive:
In this case, if you see a lot of green, that’s a good thing – there are no measured values far beyond the “this could be a problem” point. If you see yellow, the measured attributes may indicate a problem with the drive. And if the little icon is red, then your results for that particular test are abnormal and you should get a little deeper understanding of what that particular measurement might mean.
You can also just take Backblaze’s advice from 2016 and focus on the five dimensions the company uses to determine if any of its (many) drives are about to surrender to great obscurity:
- SMART 5 – Number of reallocated sectors
- SMART 187 – Uncorrectable Errors Logged
- SMART 188 – Command Timeout
- SMART 197 – Current sector pending counter
- SMART 198 – Uncorrectable Number of Sectors
While these different SMART statistics will be difficult to remember, finding the values you’re looking for is easy: anything greater than zero. Make sure you are not confused by the “value” or “worst” columns in HDDScan. You should actually be looking at the raw code. Yes, in hexadecimal format. However, if all you see are zeros on the line, that means zero (see picture) – and that’s the value you want to see for these five attributes if all goes well.
Move some data – or a lot of data
There are many ways to measure how well your hard drive is performing the two most important tasks: reading and writing data. It can be something as simple as dragging and dropping some files between your drive and a faster one and checking if it will take much longer than you expected – minus all other factors that might affect the process. (I try not to overcomplicate.)
You can also use any number of applications to evaluate the performance of your drives using synthetic benchmarks. They won’t show the exact performance that you will always see in day-to-day use, but they will give you a good idea of how your drives can perform – if something goes wrong, you will find out very quickly.
While the aforementioned HDDScan can run various read and write tests on your drives, I’m more of a HD Tune fan. It’s simple, easy and with a great graphical representation of your drive’s performance. The basic version of the app is free, and that’s all you probably need (even if you’re only testing read performance, not write performance).
To get started, download the app, select your drive and click “Start”. You will start to see your average transfer rate – with minimum, maximum and average values - as well as the access time to your disk (how long does it take for your disk to actually start transferring data, which is more a measurement of its mechanical characteristics than anything else) and burst speed (how quickly data moves out of the disk cache).
I was a little curious as to why the peak speed of my drive is lower than its average transfer rate, which made me think I had some kind of wrong motherboard configuration (unlikely) or HD Tune would screw up (maybe). To double-check those numbers, I tried another drive testing tool: CrystalDiskMark .
This is a pretty decent result for sequential reads and writes. The rest of the benchmarks are incredibly low, but this is likely due to the fact that they are trying to read and write tiny 4KB files all over the drive – a technique that mechanical hard drives don’t do very well with , especially slower ones. 5400 rpm drive which I am testing.
CrystalDiskMark does not report peak rates, so I had to turn to HDTach , which is so old that it only worked on Windows 10 when I ran it in compatibility mode with Windows XP SP3. The measured packet rate in HDTach was more favorable; since it is finally higher than the baud rate, I feel a little better knowing that I don’t have to crawl through my motherboard BIOS to see if something is wrong.
Even though HDTach and HD Tune disagreed with CrystalDiskMark in terms of average disk read and write performance (the first two applications scored much higher than the last), my primary goal of running these benchmarks was satisfied. If the disk really had problems, there is a chance to see catastrophic performance errors. Anything below 100MB / s is probably pretty good, but to confirm this, I also ran a quick UserBenchmark test.
These results support my opinion: my hard drive is working fine. Could he give faster results? Certainly. Do I know why this is not happening? No. But these results show that the drive performs better than about 73 out of every 100 results that UserBenchmark gets, which sounds good to me.
What about Steam?
Although I probably from the beginning could have imagined that in this whole process is to blame Steam update, however, my test of the mechanical hard drive was a good exercise. (I plan to update it at some point, but this is not a priority at the moment.)
On Steam, the solution was simple – I only limit downloads from midnight to six in the morning. Then I let them work all night if I ever have anything huge to grab. I can also manually trigger updates if I intend to move away from my computer for an extended period of time. This is a much more elegant solution than trying to handle a multi-gigabyte update, while I also need to use my hard drive for normal stuff.
However, I still want this $ 200 SSD.