How to Check Disk Health with PowerShell on Windows 11

Monitoring storage drive health is essential for preventing unexpected hardware failures and data loss. Windows 11 includes native PowerShell cmdlets and WMI/CIM classes that allow you to query the operational status, wear levels, and SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) metrics of your Solid-State Drives (SSDs) and Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) without third-party software.

Step 1: Open PowerShell as Administrator

To query hardware-level storage diagnostics, PowerShell requires elevated privileges.

1. Right-click the Start button on Windows 11.
2. Select Terminal (Admin) or Windows PowerShell (Admin).

Method 1: Check Basic Health Status

The Get-PhysicalDisk cmdlet provides a fast overview of all physical drives connected to your system, showing their operational state and overall health.

Run the following command:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Select-Object DeviceId, FriendlyName, MediaType, OperationalStatus, HealthStatus

• HealthStatus: A status of Healthy indicates the drive is functioning normally. Values like Warning or Unhealthy indicate hardware issues.
• OperationalStatus: Should display OK. Any other value suggests connectivity or partition degradation.

Method 2: Inspect Detailed SMART Metrics and Wear Levels

For internal NVMe and SATA drives, you can retrieve advanced reliability metrics, including temperature, wear percentage (for SSDs), and read/write error counts using Get-StorageReliabilityCounter.

Run the following command:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter | Select-Object DeviceId, Temperature, Wear, ReadErrorsTotal, WriteErrorsTotal, PowerOnHours

• Wear: Displays the percentage of estimated SSD wear (0% means a new drive, 100% means the drive has reached its rated endurance threshold).
• Temperature: Displays current operating temperature in Celsius.
• ReadErrorsTotal / WriteErrorsTotal: Any rapidly climbing non-zero value may indicate impending drive failure.
• PowerOnHours: The total lifetime operating hours of the drive.

Method 3: Check SMART Failure Prediction

Windows provides a direct query via the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) framework to see if the drive firmware has flagged an imminent hardware failure.

Run the following command:

Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName MSStorageDriver_FailurePredictStatus

• PredictFailure: If this returns False, the drive’s built-in SMART diagnostics have not detected critical hardware thresholds being breached.
• PredictFailure = True: The drive’s internal diagnostics have detected critical hardware degradation. Back up your data immediately and replace the drive.