On a typical Windows PC, all of the data is stored on a hard disk drive (HDD) or a solid state drive (SSD). Now more and more computers are coming with M.2 slots where we can install M.2 SSD. There are two types of M.2 SSD’s available – regular SATA 3 and NVMe. The NVMe M.2 SSD has much superior performance that a regular M.2 SATA 3 SSD. And if your PC’s motherboard does not come with an M.2 slot, then you can buy a PCIe M.2 card that provides not one but two M.2 slots.
No matter which one of these storage media types you have installed on your Windows PC, you can diagnose their problems and fetch their basic information using a freeware tool HDDScan.
HDDScan is a portable Windows application that comes with many tools for working with all sorts of hard disk drives or solid state drives. It works with both old and new type of drives. As soon as we launch it, we come across a beautifully designed user interface that offers three options – SMART, Tests and Tools.
We can pick the SMART section to get the SMART data for your HDD/SSD. For this to work, your UEFI/BIOS must have SMART enabled for all the attached drives. Usually most of the Windows PC have this already enabled but HDDScan will inform you if it is not enabled.
The Tests option will offer you some tests to check the performance of your selected drives. We have tests to read data directly from the drive, to read and verify the data, read data using seeks and erase the data. Similarly the Tools section gives us many tools such as reading of the drive ID information, to access various features set available on a hard drive, monitor the drive temperature and access some of the commands available for the hard drive. HDDScan tools should be carefully used and we must not tinker with these tools.
You can download HDDScan from https://hddscan.com/.