The last thing we need during quarantine is a hardware failure, and if there's one component that loves to crash at the most inopportune moment, it's the hard drive. Of course, solid state drives aren't free of blame either, and if they're already a few years old, they require similar supervision. In the past we've recommended several tools to evaluate drive surfaces and read SMART status, but today we want to add one more: Clear Disk Info, which combines three fundamental advantages: portability, ease of use, and zero cost.
During these days of social distancing, I've been studying the main changes in the hardware market, and one of the most affected categories has been solid state storage. At first, everything seemed to indicate that its freefall would continue for a while, but COVID-19 presented its credentials and prices skyrocketed. An average 240 GB SSD crossed the 40-euro barrier again, stocks are limited, and as you can imagine, this will continue for a while.
In other words, we need to be efficient with the drives we have, and keep a close eye on their health to avoid the dreaded data loss. Our first line of defense is reading the SMART status, which records practically everything about a drive, from operating hours to relocated sectors. Many free tools present this data, and today we'd like to make room for Clear Disk Info.
How to check the health of your drives
There's nothing to install here, no dependencies to satisfy. Open the Clear Disk Info executable with administrator privileges, and in a few seconds you'll see every element reported by the drive. The data categories are three: "Info", "Important" with yellow triangles, and "Critical" with red triangles.
What matters most here is the temperature of the drives, the number of relocated sectors, and the number of uncorrectable errors. Other interesting values are "Unexpected Power Loss Count" or the number of times the drive shut down unexpectedly, the total power on/off cycles, and operating hours.
https://old.neoteo.com/como-funciona-un-disco-duro-video/Other values are harder to interpret, as manufacturers don't always apply uniform measurement methods (Wear Level Count is especially problematic), but if a failure is coming, Clear Disk Info will let you know. Don't hesitate to download a copy and add it to your maintenance USB drive.
Official site and download: Click here
https://old.neoteo.com/disco-portatil-de-20-mb-asi-lucian-20-megabytes-de-informacion-en-1985/
