A Better Hard Disk Health Diagnostic [1]

A couple of days ago I wrote here about a way to quickly check the health of your hard disk. Although the technique works just fine, it gives you only the information about the current status. And although the status might be reported as healthy, this can be misleading. For example, if Windows detects a problem with your drive and then automatically fixes it, the drive will appear healthy even though the underlying problems still remain.

For a more reliable test of your hard disk, check out Crystal Disk Info which you'll find at http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en [3] in a variety of formats. The easiest option is to download the portable version of the Standard Edition, which is 4.6 MB. The program is malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust.

When you run it, it interrogates the error log in your hard disk and will tell you about the current state of the drive and also about any errors which Windows has automatically worked around. As you can see from the screen shot below, the disk in question is labelled as being of "Caution" status because Windows has automatically worked around a number of bad sectors on the drive. This disk needs replacing sooner rather than later, to avoid a major failure.