How can I read my hard drive’s SMART status in Windows 7?

Question

How can I read the S.M.A.R.T. state of my HDDs while using Windows 7, either automatically or manually?

Answer 1

HDTune works on Windows 7 too.

A blog-post reference.

Answer 2

HDTune is a good commercial software. Speedfan works too, which is free. The trick is you will need to start as Administrator under Windows 7 to see the hard disks. It also works in x64.

Answer 3

GSmartControl

GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

Free open source cross platform GUI for smartmontools.

Answer 4

Go to a command prompt and type:

wmic

then at the wmic:root\cli> prompt:

diskdrive get status

Or if you want other information, you can try options other than "status". The other options are found here.

Answer 5

S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools:

smartmontools contains utility programs (smartctl, smartd) to control/monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (S.M.A.R.T.) built into most modern ATA and SCSI disks. It is derived from smartsuite.

• command-line tools
• works on Windows Server 2008, Windows 8.1
• support quite a few USB devices: Supported USB-Devices

Answer 6

CrystalDiskInfo is a HDD/SSD utility which supports S.M.A.R.T.

• Supports a part of external USB disks
• Monitoring health status and temperature
• Alert Mail
• Graph of S.M.A.R.T. information
• Control AAM/APM settings

and more ...

MIT license, also available as a portable w/o ads zip.

Answer 7

HD Sentinel! Best ever, bar none!

Answer 8

PassMark DiskCheckup is free for personal use. Known issues of V3.0 (Build 1003):

• Hardware RAID and SCSI are not supported. But dynamic disks (software RAID) are supported.
• The Silicon Image SIL0680 Ultra-133 ATA RAID Controller has a bug which can cause a system lockup when the SMART data is accessed.. This bug exists in the current driver version, 1.0.1.7 and presumably in previous versions.
• TEC predictions about future failure dates should be taken as a guide only and should not be considered accurate.
• The majority of newer drives connected via USB and Firewire are supported. However, older drives may not be supported due to the protocol bridge on the hard disk not supporting SMART commands)

Answer 9

Now there is open source HDD Guardian, which is a graphical user interface for smartctl.

It emerged in 2014, has a good GUI, is stable (at least I haven't noticed any bugs after working a while). Personally, I really appreciate this application.

UPDATE(!): Looks like the project is closed

Answer 10

I've been trying a few out and I've settled on the free Acronis Drive Monitor

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/hard-drive-health/

Answer 11

Powershell, WMI:

gwmi Win32_DiskDrive | select Caption,Status

Answer 12

If you have a Western Digital drive, then there is a diagnostics utility to view the SMART status.

https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx#WD_softwarepc

This is a Windows version of the Data LifeGuard Diagnostics. It will test WD internal and external drives. In additional, it can provide you with the model and serial of WD drives attached to the system.

On the main program screen, there are two windows. In the top window, you will see the drives in your system that are available for testing. The model number, serial number, capacity, and SMART status of each drive will be displayed. In the bottom window, the partition information for the selected drive will be displayed.

Answer 13

Try the free version of HDD Regenerator. It shows in real time the changes of temperature of the HD, warns if it is too hot and shows full S.M.A.R.T. report.

Answer 14

One more option, you could have a look at your drive manufacturer's site in case they have tools that can interpret your particular drive's status. Some have extra settings, firmware updaters etc.

SSDs in particular tend to have these extras.

Answer 15

You can get yourself Hard 5.25'' hard drive sled enclosure and it will tell you smart status as long as you enable it in BIOS.

Software like WD diagnostic tools gives you same SMART status as hard drive bays give you, enclosures just display SMART status using color coded lights

Answer 16

If you have an Intel drive, then you can use Intel® SSD Toolbox. On the updside, you don't need third party software or drivers (assuming you trust Intel).

Unfortunately, it appears the pages for the toolbox and the search functionality, are broken so you can't find it by searching Intel's site either. You can't even search for it by item number 18455 or 80097.