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

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16 Answers 16

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78

HDTune works on Windows 7 too.

Screenshot of HDTune

A blog-post reference.

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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 2, 2017 at 2:18
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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

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  • 3
    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, 2012 at 6:05
  • 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 4, 2016 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 5, 2017 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 6, 2017 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 dslreports.com/forum/…
    – barlop
    Apr 6, 2017 at 16:17
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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.

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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, 2013 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, 2015 at 19:20
  • And it's also available as portable. +1.
    – spcsLrg
    Jul 17, 2021 at 8:14
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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.

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  • 11
    wmic diskdrive get status in command prompt works too.
    – Draco Ater
    Nov 27, 2015 at 9:47
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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, 2016 at 6:40
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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, 2016 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, 2016 at 0:01
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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, 2019 at 16:55
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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
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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, 2015 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, 2017 at 10:32
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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.

CrystalDiskInfo snapshot

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    Best option when I looked just now. The "Health Status" heuristic seems plausible.
    – Nelson
    Feb 15, 2017 at 3:01
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    This is my preference because of the small download size and wide USB controller support
    – Fred Qian
    Oct 31, 2017 at 7:39
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HD Sentinel! Best ever, bar none!

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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 and here. "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, 2015 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, 2016 at 5:22
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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)
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  • Simple and works.
    – Konrads
    Dec 7, 2012 at 11:30
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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

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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/

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Powershell, WMI:

gwmi Win32_DiskDrive | select Caption,Status
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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