The audience is constantly renewing itself, and with the new year just around the corner, it's never a bad idea to revisit classic programs for maintaining our computers. We've previously talked about CrystalDiskMark, ideal for measuring the speed of any disk, SSD, NVMe, or USB drive in the system, but it has a sibling in CrystalDiskInfo, which reports the overall health of drives, their temperature, basic interface characteristics, and available SMART values.
Expanding your computer's storage sounds like an excellent Christmas treat for yourself, but what about the drives already installed? Are they still in good shape? Do you feel any loss of speed? Disks and SSDs always run faster when they're empty, but sometimes there's something else causing problems, and we need to know what it is.
That's when a classic like CrystalDiskInfo steps in, maintained by developer Noriyuki Miyazaki of Crystal Dew World. CrystalDiskInfo is a few months shy of fifteen years online, and recently received an update bringing it to version 8.17.13, possibly the last to carry the 8.x numbering according to its official roadmap.
Check your SSD health with CrystalDiskInfo
On its first run, CrystalDiskInfo should be able to activate the system language. Its Spanish translation is relatively good, and we haven't found any serious errors. The interface is divided into two parts: the upper half shows the overall status, the exact drive model, secondary details (firmware and serial number), connection type and transfer mode, letters assigned by Windows, standards and available features (TRIM, APM, etc.), temperature, and high-profile values such as the amount of gigabytes written and hours of operation.
The second half presents everything related to SMART on the drive. The exact fields can vary greatly between manufacturers, as can stability thresholds, but the basic idea is the same: everything should be in blue or green. CrystalDiskInfo will switch to Caution (yellow) upon the first reallocated sectors, and from that point on, we should consider replacing the drive.
CrystalDiskInfo offers a traditional installer and a portable version that can also run on Windows XP. The alternate builds focus on visual themes inspired by two "mascots": Shizuku and Kurei-Kei. Functionally they're all identical, but if you want a touch of anime in a SMART reader, you should start there.
Official website and download: Click here
