The hard drive is one of the most crucial component of your system. Explore further to understand and check the health of your hard drive.
Okay, you are frustrated and absolutely tired as your computer takes ages to start. To add to your woes, after it takes hours for the computer to start, it freezes or hangs every time you open a slightly heavy program or a website. Perhaps what you might need to check here is the hard disk and the computer motherboard.
Hard disk drive health can be a reason that your computer is giving you such a ‘hair-tearing’ time. Many of you might be knowing how to deal with this problem and check your hard drive’s health. Therefore, for those who do not know and are not geeks, text about checking hard drive health is coming up, just for you!
How to Check the Health of your Hard Drive?
Step 1
Perhaps, if you do not have a disk health monitoring software, you would need to download Free disk health monitoring utility. There are many options among them. The most common is SMART – (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology).
It is used to test the health of hard disks in the computer. SMART detects and reports on several indicators of reliability, for gauging possible disk failures. You can go for any such utility.
Step 2
Once you get that software on your computer, run the windows check disk utility. It will check the hard drive for errors and repair the problems, if any in the system file. In addition to that, it also examines the physical structure, that is, the integrity of the disk surface.
Step 3
After you are done with the windows check disk utility, close all the applications, browsers, and any other utilities which might be open. Then open ‘My Computer’ and right click the mouse on your hard drive, that is the C: drive.
Follow that by clicking on ‘Properties’ and then click the Tool tab, which will be under error checking. Simply click on the option which says check now and choose the option which says ‘automatically fix file system errors’.
Step 4
Once you are done with ‘automatically fix file system errors’, select the option which says scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. Finally, click start to tune the utility. This is when the utility will check the hard drive for bad sectors, when it is checking hard drive for health.
Download and then run the freeware diagnostic tool you might be having on your computer, for instance HD Tune. This is a fabulous diagnostic tool to run an entire benchmark analysis of the hard drive. Not just that, it also identifies structural errors and makes a total analysis of the drive, checking every item.
Once this is done, close the program, shut off the computer and switch it on. Hopefully, your hard disk will be fine now.
That’s it! Now let’s take a look at another aspect of checking a hard drive. The downloading speed!
Checking Hard Drive for Speed
Well, this is as easy at it can get. Just download http://www.nu2.nu/download.php?sFile=bst514.zip. When the instruction appears on the screen, save it in a folder which you can easily remember.
Go to my computer, find the file you downloaded and then extract it in the same folder as you saved the downloaded file. Follow that up by running bst5.exe. Once that is over, click options, and then click speed test and finally click Ok and then as the interface changes, choose the start option.
In addition to this, defragmentation of disks can also help in ensuring and checking hard drive for health. It identifies the free spaces in the drive and sorts out and arranges the files together and creates continuous free space for data storage.
Now, you might be knowing how to check your hard drive’s health. Say bye to the hanged computer screen and downloading problems! Cheers!