A few built-in checks can tell you whether your HDD or SSD is showing signs of trouble. Storage drives have a tendency to fail when you least expect it. A traditional hard drive may give you a warning with clicking or grinding sounds, but an SSD has no moving parts to make a fuss. Problems with either type can manifest as corrupted files, abnormally slow access, frequent read or write errors, crashes, or a drive that periodically disappears from Windows. If any of that is already occurring, back up your important files before doing much else.

Windows has several built-in methods for checking the health of drives, but the information it can provide will vary based on the hardware in the computer. Free utilities can go further and read the drive's Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) data. There is one limitation, though. A healthy status can be reassuring, but it's certainly not a lifetime guarantee.

The simplest way to get started in Windows 11 is to open Settings, choose System, go to Storage > Advanced storage settings > Disks & volumes, select your drive, and choose Properties. Windows can display estimated remaining life, available spare capacity, and temperature for supported NVMe SSDs. It can also alert you if spare capacity is low, reliability has decreased, or if the drive has gone into read-only mode. Microsoft says this health monitoring doesn't cover SATA SSDs or traditional hard drives.

For a second opinion, Crystal Disk Info is a free tool that can read SMART data from many HDDs and SSDs, including NVMe drives. It gives the drive a health status of Good, Caution, Bad, or Unknown. If you get a Caution or Bad result, backing up becomes the priority. You can then verify the issue using the drive manufacturer's own diagnostic software, like Seagate's Sea Tools or Samsung Magician.