How can I read my hard drive’s SMART status in Windows 7?

Question

How can I read the S.M.A.R.T. state of my HDDs while using Windows 7, either automatically or manually?

possible duplicate of [When to stop using a HDD? What rules/software apply?](http://superuser.com/questions/157266/when-to-stop-using-a-hdd-what-rules-software-apply) — Tamara Wijsman, Oct 10 '10 at 19:51

score 78 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 18 '16 at 10:58

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HDTune works on Windows 7 too.

Screenshot of HDTune

A blog-post reference.

edited Oct 18 '16 at 10:58

user1251007

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answered Aug 25 '09 at 07:46

nik

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Note: The 2.5 version only read a 2TB disk as ~250GB, but the 5.7 Pro Trial version I tried does read the full capacity correctly. – Pysis Nov 02 '17 at 02:18

score 45 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 28 '13 at 20:52

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HDTune is a good commercial software. Speedfan works too, which is free. The trick is you will need to start as Administrator under Windows 7 to see the hard disks. It also works in x64.

enter image description here

edited Jan 28 '13 at 20:52

Phil

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answered Jun 30 '10 at 06:27

KalEl

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With a tool that integrates with hddstatus.com's analysis, as pictured, if there are any problems, you'll see warnings below the table with specific info and advice about them. – rakslice Jun 30 '12 at 06:05
speedfan is awesome no doubt. Thanks for the blast-from-the-past. However I found its not detecting most externally attached drives. It will detect some and for most general purposes it should be good enough – Abhishek Dujari May 04 '16 at 10:45
@Vangel and have you found nothing else that would? if you have found something better that detects more then you should say so and what program it is. – barlop Apr 05 '17 at 12:25
@barlop I wish I had. I just gave up. It seemed to me that the only way to get any information was to get for e.g. the manufacturers bloated software for different drive which provides little information of value and fails on other manufacturers automagically. It seems to me, despite efforts from industry to get the drive manufacturers to clean up their act, this mafia group isn't going to get with the program. It's light bulbs all over again. – Abhishek Dujari Apr 06 '17 at 16:07
@Vangel i'd be interested if you can name the model of drive whose SMART data you cannot access(you shouldn't paint it like a speedfan problem as you did two comments ago).. it sounds like an interesting question you could ask, too. This may be useful http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28235888-Getting-S-M-A-R-T-data-from-USB-external-drives – barlop Apr 06 '17 at 16:17
@barlop I can't recall though but seeing that I have only Seagate and Western Digitals around me. I'd say it's got to be one of those. Not sure if that helps. Like I said, it's not speedfan, and for most use cases it is perfect. The problem is only with external drives which was my use case. – Abhishek Dujari Apr 06 '17 at 18:06
@Vangel yeah well that's a bit general 'cos I have an external drive and I can read SMART data from that. Mine is a Samsung 1GB (fairly classic highly rated thing, I think model is M3).. Perhaps next time it happens you can post a question and mention the model. And attempt some suggestions that that dslreports link. – barlop Apr 06 '17 at 19:01

score 34 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 26 '14 at 18:38

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GSmartControl

GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

Free open source cross platform GUI for smartmontools.

edited Oct 26 '14 at 18:38

Amirreza Nasiri

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answered Jun 18 '13 at 15:01

ryanmonk

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Not only is this free and open source, it's better than many of the others mentioned in this question I've found, it worked when others didn't, and it knew about more SMART fields than others. – mavhc Sep 24 '13 at 11:16
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@mavhc it's more efficient because it relies on smartmontools which defines its own thresholds instead of the one provided by manufacturers :) – gaborous Feb 14 '15 at 19:20
And it's also available as portable. +1. – spcsLrg Jul 17 '21 at 08:14

score 32 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 23 '17 at 03:18

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Go to a command prompt and type:

wmic

then at the wmic:root\cli> prompt:

diskdrive get status

Or if you want other information, you can try options other than "status". The other options are found here.

edited Jul 23 '17 at 03:18

boot13

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answered Aug 18 '15 at 23:31

CoreyH

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`wmic diskdrive get status` in command prompt works too. – Draco Ater Nov 27 '15 at 09:47
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All that command does is print *"Status"* and *"OK"*. It does not even provide the drive name; and it does not provide the S.M.A.R.T. drive status. – jww Feb 22 '16 at 06:40
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@jww you can specify additional fields in get query, `wmic diskdrive get model, name, status`, or no fields to get all of them `wmic diskdrive` – Oleh Nechytailo Mar 21 '16 at 14:33
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this command did NOT detect the disk fault. other utilities did: crystaldisk, gsmartmon – Trevor Boyd Smith Sep 14 '16 at 00:01
All this seems to indicate is if the disk has failed. In crystaldiskinfo I got "caution" and in harddisksentinal I got 4% health. Also the command in windows 10 has no spaces around the commas. So it is: `wmic diskdrive get model,name,status`. – runamok Aug 04 '17 at 17:26
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`wmic diskdrive list` will give many more fields - although it doesn't include any additional health-related data. – mwfearnley Oct 29 '19 at 16:55

alexandrul · Answer 5 · 2014-06-13T04:31:08.673

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S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools:

smartmontools contains utility programs (smartctl, smartd) to control/monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (S.M.A.R.T.) built into most modern ATA and SCSI disks. It is derived from smartsuite.

command-line tools
works on Windows Server 2008, Windows 8.1
support quite a few USB devices: Supported USB-Devices

edited Jun 13 '14 at 04:31

answered Oct 10 '10 at 19:48

alexandrul

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Thanks, that's the Unix tool I normally use. - I simply did not expect to find windows support! – not-a-user Nov 19 '15 at 10:17
Mind that it requires administrator privileges so you'll have to run it with `sudo` on Linux, or `runas /user:Administrator` on Windows. – Matthieu Mar 10 '17 at 10:32

score 14 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 18 '15 at 08:35

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CrystalDiskInfo is a HDD/SSD utility which supports S.M.A.R.T.

Supports a part of external USB disks

Monitoring health status and temperature

Alert Mail

Graph of S.M.A.R.T. information

Control AAM/APM settings

and more ...

MIT license, also available as a portable w/o ads zip.

answered Aug 18 '15 at 08:35

alexandrul

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Best option when I looked just now. The "Health Status" heuristic seems plausible. – Nelson Feb 15 '17 at 03:01
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This is my preference because of the small download size and wide USB controller support – Chang Qian Oct 31 '17 at 07:39

score 12 · Answer 7 · edited Oct 28 '12 at 16:56

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HD Sentinel! Best ever, bar none!

edited Oct 28 '12 at 16:56

Peter Mortensen

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answered Jul 08 '10 at 17:53

Bjørn Mathisen

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Agree, with SmartMonTools/GSmartControl they are probably the two best SMART monitors because they don't rely on manufacturer's (biased) thresholds but rather define their own as explained [here](http://www.hdsentinel.com/smart/index.php) and [here](http://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.net/home/index.php/About). "Yet another issue is that quite often the drives have bugs which prevent correct SMART usage. This is usually due to buggy firmware, or the manufacturer ignoring the standards. Luckily, smartmontools usually detects these bugs and works around them.", on GSmartControl website. – gaborous Feb 14 '15 at 19:18
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They don't like personal statement here: Please explain rather why it's the best. – Quidam Dec 21 '16 at 05:22

score 9 · Answer 8 · answered Oct 10 '10 at 10:01

PassMark DiskCheckup is free for personal use. Known issues of V3.0 (Build 1003):

Hardware RAID and SCSI are not supported. But dynamic disks (software RAID) are supported.
The Silicon Image SIL0680 Ultra-133 ATA RAID Controller has a bug which can cause a system lockup when the SMART data is accessed.. This bug exists in the current driver version, 1.0.1.7 and presumably in previous versions.
TEC predictions about future failure dates should be taken as a guide only and should not be considered accurate.
The majority of newer drives connected via USB and Firewire are supported. However, older drives may not be supported due to the protocol bridge on the hard disk not supporting SMART commands)

MajesticRa · Answer 9 · 2017-10-13T01:06:24.047

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Now there is open source HDD Guardian, which is a graphical user interface for smartctl.

It emerged in 2014, has a good GUI, is stable (at least I haven't noticed any bugs after working a while). Personally, I really appreciate this application.

UPDATE(!): Looks like the project is closed

edited Oct 13 '17 at 01:06

answered Jan 14 '15 at 09:11

MajesticRa

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score 4 · Answer 10 · answered Feb 13 '15 at 09:51

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I've been trying a few out and I've settled on the free Acronis Drive Monitor

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/hard-drive-health/

answered Feb 13 '15 at 09:51

Aussie Ash

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score 2 · Answer 11 · answered Mar 21 '16 at 14:41

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Powershell, WMI:

gwmi Win32_DiskDrive | select Caption,Status

answered Mar 21 '16 at 14:41

Oleh Nechytailo

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`gwmi: Not found` – Chloe Oct 30 '17 at 16:30
@Chloe Did you try `gwi` or `gwmi`? The latter should be an alias for `Get-WmiObject` (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31443694/what-is-the-nature-of-the-relationship-between-gwmi-and-get-wmiobject) – mwfearnley Oct 29 '19 at 17:10

score 1 · Answer 12 · edited Jun 12 '20 at 13:48

If you have a Western Digital drive, then there is a diagnostics utility to view the SMART status.

https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx#WD_softwarepc

This is a Windows version of the Data LifeGuard Diagnostics. It will test WD internal and external drives. In additional, it can provide you with the model and serial of WD drives attached to the system.

On the main program screen, there are two windows. In the top window, you will see the drives in your system that are available for testing. The model number, serial number, capacity, and SMART status of each drive will be displayed. In the bottom window, the partition information for the selected drive will be displayed.

score 1 · Answer 13 · edited Apr 09 '22 at 00:55

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Try the free version of HDD Regenerator. It shows in real time the changes of temperature of the HD, warns if it is too hot and shows full S.M.A.R.T. report.

edited Apr 09 '22 at 00:55

Anaksunaman

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answered Aug 30 '13 at 23:15

user2672400

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This answer would be more useful if it included a reference (i.e., a link). – Scott - Слава Україні Aug 31 '13 at 00:12
@Scott done … nine years later :-) – Graham Perrin Apr 17 '22 at 08:18

score 1 · Answer 14 · answered Jul 16 '15 at 09:19

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One more option, you could have a look at your drive manufacturer's site in case they have tools that can interpret your particular drive's status. Some have extra settings, firmware updaters etc.

SSDs in particular tend to have these extras.

answered Jul 16 '15 at 09:19

XTL

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score 0 · Answer 15 · answered Jan 17 '19 at 14:46

You can get yourself Hard 5.25'' hard drive sled enclosure and it will tell you smart status as long as you enable it in BIOS.

Software like WD diagnostic tools gives you same SMART status as hard drive bays give you, enclosures just display SMART status using color coded lights

score -1 · Answer 16 · edited Jul 31 '16 at 03:39

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If you have an Intel drive, then you can use Intel® SSD Toolbox. On the updside, you don't need third party software or drivers (assuming you trust Intel).

Unfortunately, it appears the pages for the toolbox and the search functionality, are broken so you can't find it by searching Intel's site either. You can't even search for it by item number 18455 or 80097.

edited Jul 31 '16 at 03:39

Journeyman Geek

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answered Feb 22 '16 at 06:59

jww

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How can I read my hard drive’s SMART status in Windows 7?

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