Windows:I recently had a suspicion that something was up with my hard drive.
And, of course, saving money by not buying an unnecessary upgrade is the best feeling of all.
Downloads would crawl along, even though I have a pretty beefy Internet connection.
Progress bars for patch installations would appear to stall for an hour.
Pull up File Explorer, right-select a drive, and select Properties.
hit the Tools tab, and hit Check under the Error checking section.
This process runs a simple read-only Check Disk, or chkdsk, scan of your drives file system.
you’re free to get a little wilder if you have some extra time to kill.
Get S.M.A.R.T.
First, lets take a look at a typical SMART report.
If youre seeing yellow, then the measured attributesmightindicate you have an issue with your drive.
double-check you arent getting thrown off by the value or worst columns in HDDScan.
What you should actually be looking at is the raw code.
Yes, its in hexadecimal.
(Im trying to keep this simple.)
Its simple, easy, and has a lovely graphical readout of your drives performance.
To get started, load up the app, pick your drive, and click Start.
To double-check these figures, I gave another drive benchmarking tool a shot:CrystalDiskMark.
Thats a pretty decent result for a sequential read and write.
If the drive was truly having issues, theres a chance Id see catastrophic performance errors.
These results validate my thinking: my hard drive is running decently.
Could it have faster results?
Do I know why it doesnt?
What about Steam?
As for Steam, the solution there was simpleI limit downloads to only run from midnight to six a.m.
I then let em chug overnight if I ever have anything huge to grab.
I still want that $200+ SSD, though.
