This tutorial will show you how to check the current health, SMART status, temperature, and estimated remaining life of drives in Windows 11.
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), and eMMC drives. Its primary function is to detect and report various indicators of drive reliability with the intent of anticipating imminent hardware failures.
Reference:
What to do about a critical warning for a storage device - Microsoft Support
support.microsoft.com
- Option One: Check Health and SMART Status of NVMe SSD Drives in Settings
- Option Two: Check Health and SMART Status of Drives using Command
- Option Three: Check Health and SMART Status of Drives in Command Prompt at Boot
EXAMPLE: Drive failure notification
Windows only monitors NVMe SSD and not SATA SSD or hard disk drives (HDD).
1 Open Settings (Win+I).
2 Click/tap on System on the left side, and click/tap on Storage on the right side. (see screenshot below)
3 Click/tap on Advanced storage settings to expand it open, and click/tap on Disks & volumes. (see screenshot below)
4 Click/tap on Properties for a "Disk" you want to see the "Drive health" for. see screenshot below)
You will see a quick status (ex: "Healthy") under each NVMe SSD listed.
5 You will now see the current Drive health status of the NVMe SSD. (see screenshots below)
There are three types of critical warnings:
Warning | Description |
|---|---|
| Spare capacity is low | Spare storage capacity is below the manufacturer's safety threshold. |
| Reliability is degraded | Reliability is degraded because of significant media-related errors or an internal error to the NVM subsystem. |
| Drive is set to read-only | Data stored on the device can still be accessed but you can’t write to it. |
There are also three disk health attributes you can watch that affect disk performance:
Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Estimated remaining life | The approximate percentage used, which is based on the manufacturer’s prediction of drive life. Note that although the value is capped at 0%, a value below that is possible as consumption does not automatically mean device failure. |
| Available spare | A normalized percentage (0% to 100%) of the remaining spare capacity available. |
| Temperature | Temperature of the overall device in degrees Celsius. |
1 Open Windows Terminal, and select either Windows PowerShell or Command Prompt.
2 Copy and paste the command below into Windows Terminal, and press Enter. (see screenshot below)
wmic diskdrive get model,name,serialnumber,statusIf the Status of a drive shows as OK, then no issues were found with the drive.
If the Status of a drive shows as Bad or Caution, then the drive has an imminent hardware failure.
If the Status of a drive shows as Unknown, then the drive may have an imminent hardware failure, or is having problems querying the status from the firmware of the drive.
1 Open a command prompt at boot.
2 Type the command below into the command prompt at boot, and press Enter. (see screenshot below)
wmic diskdrive get model,name,serialnumber,statusIf the Status of a drive shows as OK, then no issues were found with the drive.
If the Status of a drive shows as Bad or Caution, then the drive has an imminent hardware failure.
If the Status of a drive shows as Unknown, then the drive may have an imminent hardware failure, or is having problems querying the status from the firmware of the drive.
3 When finished, close the command prompt at boot.
4 Click/tap on Continue to exit and continue to Windows 11. (see screenshot below)
That's it,
Shawn Brink
