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If you're running the long test, you may have to wait an hour or two or longer. Note: You will not get any scrolling output for your test beyond being told how long the test will take. Conveyance: sudo smartctl -t conveyance /dev/sdX.The commands for the various tests are (replace sdX with the drive that you want to test) You are more than welcome to run that which you feel needed. I oped to run the shorter test, just because I heard no clicks or other telltale signs that the hard disk was actually on it’s last legs besides the speed to which I again state I may just be spoiled by SSDs. I've highlighted the areas that were relevant to me for this test the time estimates, and the fact that my disk does NOT support a conveyance test. You're going to be given a large amount of output as seen in this screenshot. Sudo smartctl -c /dev/sdX (replace X with the appropriate letter) The next step is to find out what types of tests our disk supports, as well as an estimate to how long the tests will take to run. A conveyance test which is used to test if damages occurred during transportation of the device from the manufacturer.A longer test if you are more concerned that examines the entire disk surface.A short test, usually sufficient at detecting issues.Once we know the drive we want to check out, there are three tests that we can run, depending on how concerned you are:
#VIEW DISK HEALTH COMMAND LINE WINDOWS#
The tool we are going to be using is called smartmontools (which is also available for Windows and OS X). This tutorial is done via CLI only, however, there are tools that do the job as well I will briefly cover at the end of this. This raised the thought to me that perhaps I should write a quick how-to on this procedure for the community. I’ve been using strictly Solid State Drives for a number of years now, so I admit there was always the possibility of me just having become spoiled, but I thought that perhaps I should look into the health of the drive after all, a laptop with specs like that should in my eyes run faster so better safe than sorry. However, the HDD seemed to be running awfully slowly, even for a 5400RPM drive. So, I recently purchased a new (used, but new to me) laptop, that had a 1TB 5400RPM Hard Disk in it, granted the laptop is fairly powerful and capable of modern gaming, rendering, and number crunching thanks to a 4th generation i7 CPU and a Dedicated 2GB GDDR5 GPU.
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