Some Background …
All modern spinning hard disks and SSD drives contain S.M.A.R.T technology which enables the monitoring of various hard drive parameters, as a means of checking drive health and predicting failure.
Ordinarily, this information isn’t visible to most end users through the OS, you can however access the S.M.A.R.T metrics of your drive using a tool such as SmartMonTools.
SmartMonTools can be used to monitor hard drive health and also to run various built-in hard drive self-test operations…
It’s not uncommon for drives to contain bad sectors over time. Drives will usually detect these hard-to-read sectors and remap the data to known good sectors, all in the background without the user even knowing…
However, sometimes the disk controller will not notice the fault and may need a gentle nudge to help it discover the problem. Running a drive self-test can sometimes resolve such issues. In this guide, I’ll explain how you can do it.
Installation on Windows
First, download and install SmartMonTools from https://www.smartmontools.org/
Open SMARTMONTOOLS > SMARTCTL (ADMIN CMD) from the Windows start menu to launch the console
Viewing Help
Run the below command to list all available commands
smartctl –help
Listing Devices
Run the below command to list available devices
smartctl --scan
Viewing Disk Information
To view information about a specific disk
smartctl -x <DEVICE>
smartctl -x /dev/sda
To view the SMART metrics for a given device, run the below command
smartctl -a <DEVICE>
smartctl -a /dev/sdaSelf Test
Numerous drive self-tests routines are available, including a ‘Short’ test and ‘Long’ test.
The ‘Short’ test usually takes around 2 minutes to perform a partial scan of the drive subsystems including a partial disk surface scan. On the other hand, the ‘Long’ test will scan each and every individual sector of the drive. This can sometimes resolve disk related performance issues by helping the drive to find hard-to-read sectors and remap them. Note: This scan can take over an hour to complete.
I’d recommend running the ‘Long’ test. There is no risk to losing your data by running this command, however, it may degrade system performance while the scan is being performed.
You can run the ‘Long’ drive self-test as follows:
smartctl -t long
smartctl -t long /dev/sda
You can view the test results by running the following command:
smartctl -a <DEVICE>
smartctl -a /dev/sda
Graphical User Interface
If you’d prefer a graphical user interface rather than using a command line then check out GSmartControl which provides an easy to use interface for the SmartMonTools command line utility.
You can find it here https://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.io
Final Thoughts
I hope you’ve found this quick guide to be useful.
If you have any tips please feel free to share in the comments below.
This blog is my place to share my thoughts, helpful solutions and just random nerdy stuff.
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