Best program for checking hdd health?

GiraffePencils · 31 Mar 2015 at 14:01

Hey all,

What's the best program for checking the health of a HDD?
just to get a gauge of how much life it's got left?

Thanks

lude1962 · 31 Mar 2015 at 14:18

you could have a bash at CrystalDiskInfo but being mechanical there's no way to predict HDD lifespan.
Simplistically most progs use SMART to see the current state of the drive and whether any failings are developing, but its not foolproof, a drive can fail at any time without the SMART system reporting any problems.
Back it up or risk losing it !

GiraffePencils · 31 Mar 2015 at 14:24

Thanks,
It was a drive that was the OS/main drive, things were shaky so it's been replaced and reformatted, but just wanted to see if there was a way to check if there was much life in it for general-non-essential storage

ED209 · 31 Mar 2015 at 14:26

what make is the HDD? most manufacturers have their own tools that allow you to run checks on the HDD and find any errors

GiraffePencils · 31 Mar 2015 at 14:30

I think it's a Toshiba

ED209 · 31 Mar 2015 at 14:42

to be honest I think any would work, cant find one for Toshiba.

can try seatools as well

most will work with any HDD

arknor · 31 Mar 2015 at 14:54

HDD can die in an instant or be failing for ages.

I've got a maxtor drive that's been dying for about 2 years LOL

occasionally it won't properly power up and yesterday the boot partition got corrupted.

windows install disc fixed that and moved the boot partition to my SSD like it should have been.

hdd seems to be working fine again LOL

I actually bought a replacement storage drive but never bothered to install it