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Checking Drive SMART Values in Windows 10

Last Update: August 16th, 2022
Article ID: 724295

Modern hard drives and solid state drives include support for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology or SMART.  SMART data can show signs of drive failure or wear before data loss occurs and can be used to monitor the health of the drive including the temperature sensors in the drive itself.

From the Crystal Disk Info Graphical Utility

Crystal Disk Info can be downloaded from here, this is a 3rd party utility for viewing a drive’s SMART data in windows. This can be run without installation by downloading and extracting the ZIP file, or installed like many other applications.

Crystal Disk Info version 8.12.6 and above includes built-in support for these Plugable Products:

After extracting the zip file, right-click on “DiskInfo64.exe” and select “Run as Administrator” to start the application with Administrative permissions required to read the SMART data from the drive.

From the Command Line with smartctl

The smartctl command is provided in the smartmontools suite. This can be downloaded and installed for Windows or Linux. The current stable version 7.2 released December 30 2020. The latest daily build can be downloaded from here, these are built from the latest source code and include support for newer chipsets not available in the 7.2 release.

Smartmontools version 7.2 and above includes built-in support for these Plugable Products:

Installation and Running

  1. After downloading the smartmontools-7.2-1.win32-setup.exe, right-click on the file and select “Run as Administrator” to start the installation.  Follow the on screen steps to install smartmontools.
  2. Open a terminal, right-click on the start menu and select “Windows PowerShell (Admin)” from the pop-up menu
  3. Type in `smartctl --scan` to list the available drives
  4. To output all of the drive’s SMART data, type in `smartctl --all /dev/sdn` where /dev/sdn is the first column from the scan output for the drive to be read
  5. Optionally, output this to a file the desktop using the following: `smartctl --all /dev/sdn > $env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\smartdata.txt

If you receive an error “Open failed, Error=5” most likely the Windows PowerShell was not run as Administrator.