If your computer’s hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) is more than a couple of years old then it is time to check its health and find out if it is still working properly or experiencing some issues that could lead to loss of data later. You can easily check the health of any storage drive using the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data if supported by the storage drive and your computer. Usually SMART is both supported and enabled for HDD/SSD in modern computers.
But in order to access the SMART data, you need specialized tools that can not only access this data but also analyze it and tell you in simple terms what it means. In the past we have written about CrystalDiskInfo that can access and assess the SMART data and display it to you. In addition, it can also tell you if your hard drive’s health is under the good spectrum. A new software GSmartControl also acts in a similar way and tell you whether your HDD or SSD has passed all their health checks.
GSmartControl is actually a GUI front-end for the set of tools known together as smartctl software. But since the smartctl is completely command line interface (CLI), you may have difficulty using them in Windows. You simply have to download and launch gsmartcontrol.exe in your PC. In a few seconds, you will see all the storage devices that support SMART listed along with their health status and other useful information. You can right-click on any of them and choose to perform even more tests to determine their efficiency, performance and technical errors.
In case you find the health status to be failing for any of the storage drives, you should immediately invest in a brand new storage drive and transfer all the important files over to the new drive. You should not take risk of losing your data if the SMART health is failing.
You can download GSmartControl from https://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.io/home/.