As you probably know, your hard drive is the device which is most likely to fail. While a hard drive can fail at any time without warning, the S.M.A.R.T. sensors build into modern hard drives are a good indicator of your overall drive health. A very simple tool which allows you to view this data is Nirsoft’s DiskSmartView.
DiskSmartView is a small utility that retrieves the S.M.A.R.T information (S.M.A.R.T = Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) from IDE/SATA disks. This information includes the disk model/firmware/serial number, cylinders/heads, power-on hours (POH), internal temperature, disk errors rate, and more. You can use the S.M.A.R.T information retrieved by DiskSmartView to find out whether there is any significant problem in your disk drive.
When you launch the program, you are presented with a large list of raw number which are indicators of your drive’s health. For a breakdown of what these magical numbers mean, you can check out Wikipedia’s information on S.M.A.R.T. Additionally, there is a column called “Status” which will give you a quick indication of if the value is a warning sign.
DiskSmartView does not require any installation, so this is nice tool to include on your utility flash drive.
Like what you read?
If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:
