It's never fun when you encounter an issue with your HDD or SSD, especially if you have important data sitting on the drive. But before you get ready to clone the drive and replace it, you'll be happy to know that there are a few tools that you can use to scan and test your storage drive to identify faults and find out how much life your drive may have left.

6 Crystal disk Info

For a general SMART scan

CrystalDiskInfo is another free tool that runs a basic SMART check and reports on the health of your storage device. CrystalDiskInfo has an easy-to-use user interface with tons of useful information to help you diagnose issues with your drive.

While CrystalDiskInfo isn't as robust as other options in this collection, it does give you an overall estimation of your drive’s health, plus other information like the drive’s current temperature, how many hours the drive has been powered on for, how many read and writes the drive has performed in its lifetime, and how much life the drive has left.

5 HDDScan

Any brand, any interface

HDDScan is a storage drive testing tool that works on both HDDs and SSDs, regardless of the brand you have. The software has a much better-looking user interface than most of the tools on this list and offers both a SMART test and a surface test.

HDDScan is a portable tool, so you won't have to install it on your PC. However, the tool only works on Windows devices, so you won't be able to use it if you’re on Linux or Mac. The tool supports all drive interfaces, so you don't have to worry about using different tools for different drives.

4 GSmartControl

For in-depth reports

GSmartControl is a tool that can scan your drive and give an overall assessment of its health. This tool is particularly good at error logging, and offers users massive amounts of info on their drives. Just make sure you note down the correct error logs yourself instead of exporting the report, as there is a lot of information in the report that you most likely won't need.

The tool has three different types of tests it can run on your drive: a short self-test which is used to quickly identify if your drive is physically damaged, an extended test that runs for an hour and determines if there are any other faults in the drive, and a Conveyance Self-test which takes 5 minutes and checks that the drive hasn't been damaged while being transported.

3 Western Digital Dashboard

For WD storage drives

Western Digital also has its own proprietary tool for storage drive testing. It allows you to check the status of your drive and monitor its performance in real-time. It can run both simple and advanced tests, and even allows you to upgrade your drive's firmware from the tool itself.

The Western Digital Dashboard can be used on any WD brand HDD or SSD, but unfortunately it doesn't work for drives from other brands. The software is available on Windows and Linux but is not compatible with macOS.

2 Samsung Magician

For Samsung storage drives

Samsung Magician is a diagnostic tool created specifically for Samsung storage drives. The utility offers the normal SMART tests for the storage drive as well as gives you general statistics and performance metrics in an easy-to-read graph.

However, Samsung Magician has some extra features like being able to defragment or even erase all the data off your drive. On top of this, when starting the Samsung Magician tool, it will run a benchmark on your drive which you can use over time to compare speed and drive health.

1 Seagate SeaTools

Not only for Seagate drives

Seagate SeaTools is an excellent storage drive tool used by professionals and regular users alike. The software boasts a myriad of tools you can use to test your drives and makes it easy enough for almost anyone to use it.

Seagate offers three types of tools for users who are experiencing storage drive issues. First we have SeaTools Bootable, which is installed on a USB and can be run independently of your drive. There's also SeaTools for DOS, which is a similar version, but you install it on a CD instead. Then we have SeaTools for Windows, which installs on your Windows OS and can perform both simple and advanced testing.

SeaTools may look slightly outdated, but it gives you everything you need and more, completely for free. Seagate tools work especially well for Seagate drives, but they can work on any brand, which as we've seen isn't always the case with these kinds of brand-name tools.

To each their own

There are so many different storage drive testing tools out there, and they all have their own pros and cons. There are different use cases for all the tools mentioned above, and using one over the other will not give you any better or worse results. At the end of the day, if your drive is damaged or has poor health, it doesn't matter how many tools you use, it's still going to need to be replaced at some point soon.

So, if you are struggling to decide which tool is best for you, then you should consider the type of tests you want to run on your drive, whether the user interface matters to you or not, if you want it on your OS or installed on a USB, or if you're looking for something specific to your drive brand. The only important thing is that you are actually monitoring the health of your drive so that you don't lose all your important data without warning, because there's no easy way to fix that after the fact.