How to check the health of your hard drive

How to check the health of your hard drive: SeaTools is a powerful diagnostic utility with different types of tests and scans you can run on a hard drive. This gives you a great indication of the health of the hard drive. So part of troubleshooting computers is diagnosing issues with hard drives. If the hard drive is not functioning the way it should, there is a good possibility of losing your data. You can find out condition of the drive by running a number of tests, don’t worry these are easy to run and can help you understand if the drive is bad or starting to fail.

SeaTools do offer  some advanced options to try and fix issues with a drive if scan results show errors. My rule is before working on any drive is to make a backup of the data, why do I do this? well the answer is simple, when drive are going bad they can let go at any time, running tests on a drive could just be enough to tip it over the edge and make the hard drive crash and die.

This could result in loss of data and expensive data recovery bill if you want to recover your data. Hence why I make a backup before running any time of tests on a hard drive. It’s a good practice to get into and as a PC Repair Tech get into the habit of backing up data before working on computers, because you never know when it will come back to bit you when you don’t have a backup. Remember the golden rule of computing? Backup, Backup, Backup.

So what can we scan for on our hard drive? Once you launch SeaTools, it will detect the hard disk drives in the computer and list them, it will also tell you the type and make of the drive. Clixk Basic Tests, a list of tests are available these include; SMART Check, Short Drive Self Test, Long Drive Self Test, Drive Information, Short & Long Generic, and Advanced Tests.

Important: Fix All tests provide the ability to fix bad sectors.  The two options  for Fix Alltests, areFastandLong”.  Be sure that you have all of your data backed up before running any of theFix Alltests. 

Important: My opinion is, once drive has bad sectors  or is going bad, replace it, because sooner or later it let go and die on you. For the money they cost to replace is it worth it?

So let’s start but running some basic tests on our drive to check its health.

1. Lets start with a S.M.A.R.T. check test, Click Basic Tests and choose S.M.A.R.T Check

smart-check

2. It should say passed if S.M.A.R.T. scan is good

(S.M.A.R.T. Error means you should backup your data as soon as possible and start to think about replacing your drive)

s.m.a.r.t.-scan

3. Lets run a short scan on the drive open Basic Tests and Click Short Self Drive Test

short-drive-self-test

4. Once scan is complete, your looking for a passed test.

passed

5. If you want some information on the drive, you can do that also. Open Basic Tests and click on Drive Information

select-info

6. Hard Drive information is great for getting Model Number, Serial Number, Power on Hours and much more.

drive-info

7. You can save this information and use it for warrant information and to show customer.

That’s it, these are some basic steps you can use to quickly test the health of your drive, there is more you can do with SeaTools, ike Long scan for better diagnostic results of the drive, something that the short scan might miss. Also there is a Fix All feature that attempts to fix bad sectors. but there is always a risk when running this feature.

I will leave a link to SeaTools How to use SeaTools for Windows if you need a more information on how to use the great tool.

 

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