Instead, we should take a full backup of any essential files, which is something we should be doing on every hard drive, even the 'Good' ones. So, we must not rush to replace a hard drive with a 'Caution' health status.

In other words, there have been hard drives with 'Caution' that continued working flawlessly for years, and 'Good' hard drives that failed the next day. The best it does is statistical predictions, based on the S.M.A.R.T. We must always keep in mind that CrystalDiskInfo cannot read the future. Should I panic if I get a Caution or Bad health status? In such a case, it's a good idea to run CrystalDiskInfo once or twice a week to see if there is any change. If we have a couple of 'cautions' but not enough to affect the disk's health status, we should just keep an eye on them. But if the sectors are multiplying, it's a sure sign that something is wrong.įrom the rest of the metrics, if one deserves our attention, CrystalDiskInfo will change its color to yellow for caution or red if it is bad. A single sector isn't the messenger of a complete hard disk failure by itself. Reallocated sectors are one of the most severe conditions for a hard drive. In the above example, the Reallocated Sectors Count is 0, not 100 or 10. First we go to Function -> Advanced Feature -> Raw Values and select 10.Īfter that, we completely disregard the 'Current', 'Worst' and 'Threshold' columns, and only look at the raw values. While the Health Status is loud and clear, and pretty easy to understand, the rest of the data can be daunting for a beginner. How to read and interpret CrystalDiskInfo data Others are more serious metrics, like the Reallocated Sectors Count.Īs you understand, having a 'Caution' or a 'Bad' health status can predict imminent hard drive failure. Some of them are simple statistics, such as the Start/Stop Count, the Power-On Hours, or the Power Cycle Count.

On the bottom half of the main application Window, we will see all the fifteen different metrics CrystalDiskInfo takes into consideration, to predict hard drive failure. If the 'Health Status' is 'Good', the disk is probably OK. The first time we run the application, it will immediately show us the S.M.A.R.T. How CrystalDiskInfo predicts Hard Disk Failure DiskInfoX64 is for 64-bit Windows, and DiskInfo is for 32-bit Windows.

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