Hello.

Forewarned is forearmed! This rule comes in handy when working with hard drives. If you know in advance that such and such a hard drive will most likely fail, then the risk of data loss will be minimal.

Of course, no one will give a 100% guarantee, but with a high degree of probability, some programs can analyze S.M.A.R.T. readings. (a set of software and hardware that monitors the condition of the hard drive) and draw conclusions on how long it will last.

In general, there are dozens of programs to perform such a hard drive check, but in this article I wanted to focus on some of the most visual and easy to use. So…

How to find out the status of your hard drive

HDDlife

(By the way, in addition to HDD, it also supports SSD drives)

One of the best programs for constantly monitoring the condition of your hard drive. It will help you recognize the threat in time and replace the hard drive. Most of all, it captivates with its clarity: after launching and analysis, HDDlife presents the report in a very convenient form: you are shown the percentage of the “health” of the disk and its performance (the best indicator, of course, is 100%).

If your performance is above 70%, this indicates the good condition of your disks. For example, after a couple of years of work (quite active by the way), the program analyzed and concluded: that this hard drive is about 92% healthy (which means that it should last, unless force majeure occurs, at least the same amount) .

After launch, the program minimizes to the tray next to the clock and you can always monitor the status of your hard drive. If any problem is detected (for example, the disk temperature is high, or there is too little space left on the hard drive), the program will notify you with a pop-up window. Example below.

HDDLIFE alerts you when your hard drive is running out of space. Windows 8.1.

If the program analyzes and gives you a window like the one in the screenshot below, I advise you not to delay making a backup copy (and replacing the HDD).

HDDLIFE - the data on your hard drive is in danger, the faster you copy it to other media, the better!

Hard Disk Sentinel

This utility can compete with HDDlife - it monitors the disk status just as well. What captivates us most about this program is how informative it is and how easy it is to work with. Those. it will be useful for both a novice user and an already experienced one.

After launching Hard Disk Sentinel and analyzing the system, you will see the main program window: hard drives (including external HDDs) will be presented on the left, and their status will be displayed in the right window.

By the way, there is a rather interesting function for predicting the performance of the disk, according to how long it will serve you: for example, in the screenshot below the forecast is more than 1000 days (that’s about 3 years!).

The condition of the hard drive is EXCELLENT. No problematic or weak sectors were found. No speed or data transmission errors were detected.
No action needs to be taken.

By the way, the program has a rather useful function: you can set the threshold for the critical temperature of the hard drive, upon reaching which Hard Disk Sentinel will notify you that it has been exceeded!

Hard Disk Sentinel: disk temperature (including the maximum for the entire time the disk was used).

Ashampoo HDD Control

An excellent utility for monitoring the status of hard drives. The monitor built into the program allows you to find out in advance about the first problems with the disk (by the way, the program can even notify you about this by e-mail).

Also, in addition to the main functions, a number of auxiliary ones are built into the program:

Disk Defragmenter;

Testing;

Cleaning the disk from garbage and temporary files (always relevant);

Deleting the history of visiting sites on the Internet (useful if you are not alone at the computer and do not want anyone to know what you are doing);

There are also built-in utilities for reducing disk noise, adjusting power, etc.

Screenshot of the Ashampoo HDD Control 2 window: everything is fine with the hard drive, condition 99%, performance 100%, temperature 41 degrees. (it is desirable that the temperature be less than 40 degrees, but the program believes that for this disk model everything is in order).

By the way, the program is completely in Russian, intuitively thought out - even a novice PC user can figure it out. Pay special attention to the temperature and status indicators in the main program window. If the program produces errors or the condition is assessed as extremely low (+ in addition there is a grinding or noise coming from the HDD), I recommend that you first copy all the data to other media, and then start dealing with the disk.

Hard Drive Inspector

A distinctive feature of this program is:

1. Minimalism and simplicity: there is nothing superfluous in the program. It gives three indicators in percentage terms: reliability, performance and absence of errors;

Hard Drive Inspector - monitoring the condition of the hard drive.

СrystalDiskInfo

A simple but reliable utility for monitoring the status of hard drives. Moreover, it works even in cases where many other utilities refuse, crashing with errors.

The program supports several languages, is not full of settings, and is designed in a minimalist style. At the same time, it has quite rare functions, for example, reducing the disk noise level, temperature control, etc.

What is also very convenient is a graphical display of the situation:

Blue color (as in the screenshot below): everything is ok;

Yellow color: alarm, measures need to be taken;

Red: you need to take immediate action (if you still have time);

Gray: the program was unable to determine the readings.

CrystalDiskInfo 2.7.0 - screenshot of the main program window.

HD Tune

This program will be useful to more experienced users: who, in addition to a graphical display of the “health” of the disk, also need high-quality disk tests, in which they can familiarize themselves in detail with all the characteristics and parameters. It should also be noted that the program, in addition to HDD, also supports new-fangled SSD drives.

HD Tune offers a rather interesting feature to quickly check a disk for errors: a 500 GB disk is checked in about 2-3 minutes!

HD TUNE: quickly find errors on the disk. Red squares are not allowed on a new disk.

Also very necessary information is checking the disk read and write speed.

HD Tune - checking disk speed.

Well, we can’t help but note the tab with detailed information about the HDD. This is useful when you need to know, for example, supported functions, buffer/cluster size or disk rotation speed, etc.

HD Tune - detailed information about the hard drive.

In general, there are at least as many similar utilities that can be cited. I think that these will be more than enough for most...

And lastly: do not forget to make backup copies, even if the disk condition is rated as 100% excellent (at least the most important and valuable data)!

Good luck...

Users who have purchased a pre-assembled PC or laptop often do not know which drive is installed on their computer. In this material, we will look at several simple ways to determine the type of drive in the operating system Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10.

How to find out SSD or HDD in Windows 10

If you use the Windows 8 or operating system, then you can find out which drive is on your computer in just a couple of mouse clicks. To do this, open the Start menu or press the Windows-S key combination (if you have Windows 8) and enter the word “Defragmentation” into the search.

The program “and optimizing your drives” should appear in the search results. Open it and you will see a list of all the drives that are installed on your computer. In this case, next to each of these disks the type of this disk, SSD or HDD, will be indicated.

If “Solid State Drive” is indicated, then it is SSD, and if “ ”, then HDD.

How to find out SSD or HDD in Windows 7

If you use the Windows 7 operating system or the method described above did not work for you for some reason, then you can determine which disk is on your computer using third-party programs. For example, you can use the program. Launch this program on your computer, go to the “Drives” section and select the drive whose type you need to define as SSD or HDD.

If this drive is a hard drive, that is, an HDD, then on the right side of the window, in the “Media Rotation Rate” line, its rotation speed will be indicated (for example, 7200 RPM).

If the drive is a solid-state drive, that is, then in the “Media Rotation Rate” line it will be written “SSD Drive (Non-ratation)”.

You can also see what drive is installed on your computer using the program. Run this program on your computer and pay attention to the data in the “Storage” block. There will be information about all drives that are connected to the PC.

In this case, there will be a corresponding mark next to the solid-state drives (SSDs).

If it is not possible to install these programs, then you can simply find out the name of the disk model and search for information about it on the Internet. In order to use this option, you need to open “Device Manager”. This can be done in different ways, the simplest and most universal is to press the Windows-R key combination and execute the command “mmc devmgmt.msc”.

In the "Device Manager" window, open the "Disk Devices" section. Here you will see a list of all the drives on your computer.

Enter the name of the desired disk into any search engine and study information about it. This way you can easily determine the type of drive SSD or HDD.

Hard disk capacity is a characteristic that is most often the decisive factor for the user when choosing or replacing a disk. So how can you find out the real volume, given that when marking hard drives, a gigabyte is equated not to 1024, but to 1000 megabytes. And if in the recent past, when the HDD size rarely exceeded 80 GB, this could be neglected, then with a disk size of more than a terabyte, the losses amount to significant figures. You can get information about the real size of your hard drive both from the BIOS and using the operating system and various third-party utilities.

You will need

• computer running the Windows operating system, HDD Life Pro utility, Internet access.

Instructions

There are few cases when you need to find out the model of your hard drive. Most often, a similar question is asked when the hard drive has given up life - errors appear during operation, or the OS does not boot at all due to a non-working disk. It happens that you need to identify your HDD in order to replace it with a more capacious one, or this information is simply interesting for you.

In any case, problems with the hard drive are those that can be fixed in workshops, since computer repair at home is advisable only when the problem can be fixed quickly and efficiently. Diagnosing HDD faults takes a long time, which means you can only quickly replace the problem disk with a new one.

The most primitive way to find out your hard drive is to remove it from the system unit or laptop case. To do this, turn off the power (remove the laptop battery), unscrew the system unit (or the bottom cover on the bottom of the laptop) and take out our HDD, on which all the information of interest will be visible - manufacturer, volume, speed, country of manufacture and other parameters.

If you have no desire to disassemble your laptop or unwind the system unit, then we can find out all the information you need using the software method.

How to find out the real size of your hard drive

For a better understanding, manufacturers and sellers indicate the traditional disk capacity: 40, 60, 120, 160, 320, 500, 640 GB and so on. However, in reality it is always less than stated, because:
1 GB = 1024 MB
1 MB = 1024 KB
1 KB = 1024 bytes

and manufacturers round up to 1000 when making calculations. Below is a table of correspondence between the labeled HDD volume and the real one.

To verify this, right-click on the shortcut My computer and select Control. In the utility that opens, go to the tab Storage devices - Disk management

In our case, the utility shows 465.65 GB, which corresponds to the 500 GB marking.

How to find out your hard drive model

As in the previous method, right-click on the shortcut My computer and select Control. In the computer management utility that opens, open the tab device Manager. Expand here Disk devices and you will see the hard drives installed on your computer.

In our case, there are two of them - Hitachi HTS545050A7E380 and SanDisk SSD i100 24 GB. The first is a traditional HDD, the second is a solid-state SSD drive.

How to find out all the information about your hard drive

To the program AIDA64 we already asked for help when we were looking for, etc. This utility will help us this time too.

You can familiarize yourself with the AIDA64 program and download it for free from our website.

Launch AIDA on your computer and go through the tabs Data Storage - ATA. At the top of the window, select the desired hard drive, if there are several of them, and the program will show all the information about the hard drive. The report is divided into parts, the information we need is entitled as ATA Device Properties And Device Physical Data.

As you can see, everything is elementary and absolutely simple if you know what tools to use to find information.

Greetings everyone! Let's start with what a hard drive is. This is the disk on which everything you have on your computer is stored. programs, photos, music, videos, games and the operating system are also installed on the hard drive. In general, everything is stored on the hard drive. If the disk flies, then all yours will be irretrievably lost. They are almost impossible to restore. Therefore, the disc must be handled with care, not hitting the disc, especially when it is running. Hard drives come in different shapes factors, well these are the sizes of the drives. There are 2.5 and 3.5. Usually 2.5 is installed on laptops, but sometimes collective farms install such a disk on a regular computer.

There are many ways to find out what hard drive is on your computer. You can find out both through the program and without it. You can find out whether ssd or hdd is installed, 2.5 or 3.5 form factor and all its characteristics. Do you know what their pros and cons are? If not, go to the article and learn a lot of new things for yourself. Well, let's get started :)

Through computer control

To find out what kind of hard drive is installed, we need to get into computer management. But how to get there?

To do this, look for the shortcut on the desktop “My Computer” and right-click and select “Manage”.

If you don’t have a “My Computer” shortcut on your desktop, like me, I don’t know where it went, then this is not a problem. I have such a mess on my desktop that maybe I just didn’t find it).

Then click on the “Start” button and there will definitely be “My Computer”, right-click on it and select “Manage”. That's it, half the job is done. Let's move on.

In the window that appears on the left side, look for the tab “ storage devices ", open it and press " disk management «.

The right side will display information about the installed hard drives and SD drives on the computer.

To find out the exact model of the installed hard drive on your computer, right-click on the drive as in the screenshot and select “Properties”

A window will open with information about the hard drive, where the model is indicated.

Now you know the name of your hard drive and to get more detailed information, to do this, turn to the search engine and enter the model name there.

Go to the website and find out information about the disk. It's all very simple, isn't it?)

Via task manager

This method is also very easy to find out what kind of hard drive you have.

To do this, right-click on the “My Computer” shortcut and click on “Device Manager.”

We look for the “Disk devices” tab, open it and see the installed hard drives.

Using the Aida64 program

This method requires downloading and installing the Aida64 program, which you don’t really want to do) because you can find out what hard drive is on your computer without unnecessary programs. But for those who are not looking for easy ways, this method is dedicated to you :)

But besides this data, the processor and other components.

After launching the software, open the item in the “Data Storage” menu -> “ATA”.