Our storage drives are
the soul of the computer, holding our entire digital life on their memory. From
the work and documents of our work life and professional jobs to our precious
personal and family photos and our entertainment life.
Therefore, it is always
necessary to check its condition from time to time to be sure of its safety and
its ability to continue for a longer period of time.
But there is no
objection to keeping our precious files and data in a safe place as a backup
for emergency reference.
Where you can rely on
NAS storage solutions If you have the budget, you can rely on external storage
drives, you can even turn to cloud storage.
All that matters is that
you keep a backup copy of your important and necessary data. But back to the
focus of our discussion, we will show you 6 different ways that allow how to
check the status of the hard disk on Windows 10, so let's go.
Via the BIOS interface
Fortunately, most modern
motherboards have a newer and smarter BIOS interface that allows us to check
the state of the hard drive from within the BIOS.
Reboot the computer and
then press the delete button or F12 continuously to enter the BIOS. And search
for settings, advanced settings, then "NVME self-test" by clicking
this command it will check your hard drive, but this is in case your hard drive
is an M.2 SSD with NVMe PCIe interface.
Improve performance and defragmentation in Windows 10
In fact, solid state
storage solutions don't require defragmentation, but if you're starting to notice
very slow hard drive performance, you can fix this problem.
Fortunately, Windows 10
is smart enough to take the job in turns, but you can always check for yourself
manually. Just type in the start menu search bar the following command
"Defragment and Optimize Drives" then start Analyze and then Optimize
Storage Sectors.
Use the disk drive manufacturer's scan tool
All manufacturers
provide a tool for checking the status of their USB flash drives. Western
Digital, Seagate, Samsung, Adata and many more. Just search the private
downloads on their official pages and you will find a tool responsible for
checking their storage drives that you have.
These tools are mostly
responsible for checking the condition and health of the hard disk and
sometimes improving its condition, fixing any errors in the way it works or
testing its efficiency and the remaining lifespan of it.
Windows CHKDSK Tool
This in-Windows tool is
responsible for checking the system and storage sectors for errors and
maintenance. The results will tell you if there are any intractable technical
issues that it can't solve on its own.
Just click on the
storage sector you want to check with the right mouse button, then from the
drop-down menu click on properties, then on the Tools tab, then click on Check
now.
The tool will scan for
errors and bad sectors but won't be able to fix intractable technical problems,
it just tries to tell you if those problems exist.
Use the WMIC . command
WMIC is a command line
interface that allows you to perform many tasks, including validating a hard
drive.
Using the SMART Hard
Drive feature, it can monitor and analyze the hard drive and extract a short
report of the results in the form of "Ok" which means the hard drive
is in good condition, or Praid Fail which means the hard drive is damaged.
Just type in the WMIC
Command Prompt window and then click on the Enter key and after that type this
command diskdrive get status and click again on the Enter key. And you will get
a quick result of the status of all the storage disks connected to the
computer.
Check and repair disk errors using PowerShell
You can also use the
PowerShell tool in the Windows system to enter some commands that will fix the
errors of the hard disk if there are any errors, and it may work better than
the CMD command prompt, meaning that it is more effective in some cases of
problems with the hard disk. But you must run PowerShell with administrator
privileges by opening the Start menu and then searching for the Windows
PowerShell folder in the Applications column, right-clicking on PowerShell, and
clicking Run as admin from the drop-down menu to start the tool with admin
rights.
In the blue window of
the power shell, you will enter the command "Repair-Volume -DriveLetter C
-SpotFix" and replace the letter "C" with the letter of the
partition on which Windows is installed. Well, after entering the command,
press Enter to do a repair directly for any problem in the hard drive, but if
you want to check only for errors or not, then enter the command "Repair-Volume
-DriveLetter C" to tell you after checking for errors.
Use an external application such as CrystalDiskInfo
You can always rely on
third-party hard drive scanning applications to get comprehensive and more
accurate results, and for this, you will not find a better tool than
CrustalDiskInfo.
Although it is a very
simple but accurate, powerful, and light tool on PC. With it, you can see the
temperature, the status of the hard disk, the read and write speeds, and many
other features.