How to See if Your Hard Drive is Dying

Hard drives use S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) to gauge their own reliability and determine if they’re failing. You can view your hard drive’s S.M.A.R.T. data and see if it has started to develop problems.

Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t have an easy-to-use built-in tool that shows your hard disk’s S.M.A.R.T. data. We will need a third-party tool to view this information, though there is a way to check your S.M.A.R.T. status from the command prompt.