WD Drive Utilities for Windows. WD Security for Windows. WD SmartWare. Western Digital SSD Dashboard. Software for Mac GoodSync for WD. Install WD Discovery for Mac. WD Drive Utilities for Mac. WD Security for Mac. Product Firmware Product. If your product is. HDD Guardian is the next free software to check hard drive bad sectors for Windows. In this software, you can find various dedicated tests to find out hard drive bad sectors. Besides this, it also shows the health status of the hard drive by reading its S.M.A.R.T. Data.Plus, some advanced features to make changes on hard drive’s power management, read/write operation, hard drive acoustic. ZVH, over on MacRumors, has written a list of drive testing tools but beware most of these cost money: Mac hard drive test software - creating the definitive list. Disk Utility, diskutil (FREE, comes with OS) Smartmon Tools (FREE, Open Source) SMARTReporter ($4.95 for commercial version, but an older version is FREE) Scannerz Lite ($21.95).
Keeping you Mac's hard drive or SSD healthy is hugely important. By monitoring and checking your Mac hard drive's health, you can anticipate potential problems and prevent potentially catastrophic crashes. How do you know if your Mac is working properly?
Fortunately, there are a number of tools available that allow to to check the health of a drive and fix problems before they become serious.
Best Apps to Check Your Mac Hard Drive Health
One of the best apps for alerting you to potential problems is iStat Menus, available in Setapp. Once you've installed it, iStatMenus sits in your Mac's menu bar and monitors not just your hard drive, but its CPU, RAM and network traffic, among other things.
iStat Menus, and the other disk monitoring tools available for macOS, monitor what is knows as SMART status. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology and is installed on most hard drives and SSDs. In order to use it, you need software to analyze and display what it finds, and that's where iStatMenus comes in.
Monitoring SMART reports won't prevent your hard drive from failing, but it will reduce the likelihood of problems occurring.
Note: As of 2016, Apple no longer allows software tools to check the SMART status of an SSD. So iStatMenus won't repot anything on Macs shipped in 2016 or later.
There are other steps you can take to keep your hard drive or SSD healthy. CleanMyMac X has a number of maintenance routines. While most of them are designed to keep your Mac running smoothly, one of them is an excellent way to keep your hard drive in good shape.
How to verify Startup disk
Identifying bad sectors with Disk Drill
Sectors are blocks of space on a disk drive and bad sectors are blocks that cannot be read because, for whatever reason, they're damaged. When Disk Drill attempts to recover data from a hard drive that's failed or one where you've mistakenly deleted files, it marks sectors it can't read from as bad. That means that it won't try to recover data from them in the future.
You can't fix bad sectors, the drive's firmware should identify them and prevent them from being written to. If there's data stored in them and you need to recover it, you're out of luck. But by monitoring how many of them there are on a drive, you can keep an eye on its health and decide whether it's time to replace it, if the number of bad sector starts to increase quickly.
Here's how to identify bad sector in Disk Drill:
How to avoid problems from an unhealthy hard drive
You should always backup your hard drive regularly, but it's even more important to do it when you suspect your hard drive is having problems. If you identify problems with a hard drive using any of the steps above, you should consider increasing the frequency of your backups and test them to make sure you can recover data if you need to – a backup routine is useless if you can't restore data. You should also consider using Get BackUp Pro to make a complete clone of the drive, that way, in an emergency you can boot from the clone and be back up and running immediately. Click here to read about how to backup your Mac. Get Backup Pro, also available in Setapp, is an excellent tool for making regular backups.
How to recover from a failed hard drive
If it's already too late and your hard drive has failed and lost data, you should try to recover the data before you do anything else.
These might also interest you:How to Check Your Hard Drive's HealthCheck Your Drive's S.M.A.R.T. StatusEvery hard drive dies eventually. Here's how to prepare for its demise.
We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use.
Your hard drive hasn't been acting the same lately. It's starting to make clicking or screeching noises, it can't seem to find your files, and it's moving really slowly. It might be time to say farewell—but here's what you should do before it goes to the big data center in the sky.
Every hard drive dies eventually, and when it's near death, you'll see the signs: strange noises, corrupted files, crashing during boot, and very slow transfer speeds all point to the inevitable end. This is normal, especially after your drive is more than a few years old. On older spinning drives, moving parts like the motor can degrade over time, or the drives' magnetic sectors can go bad.
Newer solid-state drives (SSDs) don't have moving parts, but their storage cells degrade a little bit every time you write to them, meaning they too will eventually fail (though SSD reliability is much better than it used to be).
Unless your drive experiences excessive heat or physical trauma, it'll probably fail gradually. That means even if your drive isn't making strange noises, you should keep an eye on its health once in a while, so you can prepare for death before it happens. Here's how to do that.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.
Check Your Drive's S.M.A.R.T. Status
Most modern drives have a feature called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) that monitors different drive attributes in an attempt to detect a failing disk. That way, you can be ready to replace your drive before it dies of old age.
Windows
In Windows, you can quickly check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your drives from the Command Prompt. Just right-click the Start menu, select Run, and type 'cmd' or type 'cmd' into the search bar. In the pop-up box, run:
wmic diskdrive get model,status
It will return 'Pred Fail' if your drive's death is imminent, or 'OK' if it thinks the drive is doing fine.
Mac
On a Mac, you can check S.M.A.R.T. status by opening Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities/, clicking on the drive, and looking at 'S.M.A.R.T. Status' in the bottom left, which will either read 'Verified' or 'Failing.'
More Detailed S.M.A.R.T. Information
However, this basic S.M.A.R.T. information can be misleading, since it only lets you know when your drive is near death—but you can start to experience problems even if the basic S.M.A.R.T. status is okay.
For a closer look, I recommend downloading CrystalDiskInfo for Windows (free), or DriveDx for macOS ($20 with a free trial), both of which will offer up more detailed S.M.A.R.T. information than your computer provides on its own.
Instead of saying your drive is 'OK' or 'Bad,' like the built-in tools do, CrystalDiskInfo and DriveDx also have more intermediary labels, like 'Caution' or 'Warning,' respectively. These labels apply to hard drives and SSDs that are starting to wear down, but aren't necessarily on their deathbed (you can read more about how CrystalDiskInfo applies those labels here).
Hard Disk Health Check Tool![]()
For example, my drive above has a few bad and reallocated sectors, and I haven't run into any issues—probably because those bad sectors weren't housing any actual data at the time. But if even one of those bad sectors lands on a file you need, it can be rendered corrupt. So that 'Caution' label is usually a good indicator that you should back up the drive and think about replacing it soon—even if you aren't having problems yet.
If you want an even deeper, more accurate picture into your drive's health, check its manufacturer's website for a dedicated tool—for example, Seagate has SeaTools for its drives, Western Digital has Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for its drives, and Samsung has Samsung Magician for its SSDs. These tools can sometimes take into account certain technologies specific to their hard drives and SSDs. But for most people, CrystalDiskInfo will give you a decent ballpark recommendation for just about any drive.
If Your Hard Drive Is Dead (or Almost Dead)
Drives with the 'Caution' or 'Pred Fail' status won't necessarily fail tomorrow. They could chug along for a year or two, or be dead as a doornail in a week. But if you're getting warnings, it's time to back up your files before your drive kicks the bucket.
Now is not the time for a full backup, however: you don't want to stress the drive with too many reads, or it could fail while you're backing up. Instead, plug in an external drive and copy your most important files onto it—family photos, work documents, and anything else that can't easily be replaced. Then, once you know those are safe, you can try doing a full drive clone with something like EaseUS Todo Backup Free (Windows) or Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac).
If your hard drive has already stopped working, things get a lot tougher. You can try popping the drive in the freezer, which may allow you to get a few more minutes or hours out of the drive—enough to get your files off. If that doesn't work, though, your only option is a professional data recovery service like DriveSavers, which can cost $1,000 or more. But if you have priceless family photos on the drive, it may be worth it to you.
Prepare for Hard Drive Failure NOW
It's not a matter of 'if' your hard drive will fail—it's a matter of 'when.' All hard drives fail eventually, and if you want to avoid losing all your important files, you absolutely have to back up your computer regularly—including when the drive is healthy. I know, I know, you've heard it before...but are you actually doing it?
Take some time tonight to set up an automatic, cloud-based backup like Backblaze. It only takes 15 minutes and it is one of the best things you can do to protect yourself from heartache later on. If you can't stomach the $5 monthly price, then at least back up to an external drive using Windows' built-in File History tool or your Mac's built-in Time Machine feature. But just know that won't protect you in case of fire or theft, and the peace of mind you get from cloud-based backup is priceless.
Hard Drive Test Mac
Yes, good backup costs money, but it costs a heck of a lot less than getting your data professionally recovered. And with a backup, you'll never sweat the small stuff. Even if your drive failed catastrophically with no warning, you can get back up and running in no time.
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2020
Categories |