Drive health can be determined by investigating the following SMART Attributes, looking at the RAW_VALUE columns.
If it is a traditional mechanical hard drive (HDD):
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct
10 Spin_Retry_Count
11 Calibration_Retry_Count
196 Reallocated_Event_Count
197 Current_Pending_Sector
198 Offline_Uncorrectable
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count
223 Load_Retry_Count
If it is a Solid-State Drive (SSD):
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct
177 Wear_Leveling_Count
179 Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot
181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total
182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total
183 Runtime_Bad_Block
187 Uncorrectable_Error_Cnt
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel
195 ECC_Error_Rate
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count
235 POR_Recovery_Count
241 Total_LBAs_Written
If the drive shows perfect health (i.e. zero for all of the above values, except for the total number of blocks written (241 Total_LBAs_Written)) then it is likely to be a drive in good working order. If the drive has problems, run the manufacturer's diagnostic test to see if it has reached the manufacturer's failure threshold, which could be lower than the drives overall "SMART failure" threshold.
Threshold Example
The table below illustrates the possible differences between a drive that could pass SMART but fail the manufacturer's test (50 reallocated sectors in the example) or it may pass the manufacturer's test but have definite problems and will likely fail (20 reallocated sectors in the example).
Number of Reallocated Sectors
|
Drive Health
|
0
|
Perfect.
|
1
|
The drive has experienced a problem, but the user is unlikely to be impacted.
|
20
|
Drive is failing. It is likely to be slow and the user may be impacted.
|
50
(for example)
|
Drive may now fail the manufacturer's test.
|
100
(for example)
|
Drive now fails its own SMART failure threshold and the BIOS will display a SMART warning, if supported.
|
