CrystalDiskInfo — The Complete Guide: Check Drive Health Before It Fails

CrystalDiskInfo, from Crystal Dew World, is the common Windows tool for checking the health of hard disks and SSDs. It is open source (MIT) and free for any use. The download page lists installer variants marked Ads — download the Standard Edition, as a ZIP or a regular installer.

CrystalDiskInfo

Crystal Dew World (hiyohiyo)

Checks the health of HDD, SSD and NVMe drives from S.M.A.R.T. data, with temperature, alerts and background monitoring.

Get it from the vendor

What you get

Health status — good, caution or bad for every drive at a glance.
Temperature and power-on hours — spot a drive that runs hot or has worked for years.
Total data written — a key wear indicator for SSDs.
NVMe and USB — including some external drives and Intel RAID.
Alerts and graphs — runs in the background, alerts by email too, and tracks changes over time.

What to do when it turns yellow

A caution status means back up now, not next week: copy your project folders to another drive or the cloud, and only then plan a replacement. The tool warns about a problem but does not fix it and does not replace a backup. It is also worth running before buying a second-hand computer.

Related tools

To measure read and write speed — CrystalDiskMark. For a graphical check on Linux and macOS too — GSmartControl. For server monitoring from the command line — smartmontools.