HDD Health Monitor is a free, open-source Windows utility for reading raw S.M.A.R.T. information from physical drives. It shows health and estimated performance percentages for each drive, plus a complete S.M.A.R.T. attribute table. The program scans physical drives automatically and can monitor several simultaneously, giving each one its own tray icon and notifications. Alerts can cover temperature, worsening health, predictive failure, reallocated sectors, uncorrectable errors, and NVMe critical warnings. While running, it records health and selected attribute snapshots every five seconds and keeps the history on disk between sessions. Supported drive types include ATA/SATA, M.2 SATA, NVMe, USB, and SCSI, although available data depends on the drive and controller. It runs as a standalone executable without installation or dependencies, but administrator privileges are required. Windows Vista through Windows 11 are listed as supported.
Who it is for
It suits Windows users who want ongoing health and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring for one or more physical drives. It is also useful when tracking changes over time or watching removable USB storage.
What is good
- Free, open-source MIT-licensed utility
- Monitors multiple physical drives simultaneously
- Records snapshots every five seconds
- Alerts cover several drive failure indicators
- Runs without installation or dependencies
What to know first
- Administrator privileges are required
- USB enclosures may block S.M.A.R.T. data
- Unofficial USB flash drives usually lack readable S.M.A.R.T.
- Some antivirus products may falsely flag it
Verdict
HDD Health Monitor combines automatic multi-drive scanning, detailed S.M.A.R.T. information, alerts, and persistent history at no charge. Its usefulness depends on whether each drive or USB bridge exposes readable S.M.A.R.T. data.
HDD Health Monitor plans and pricing
All plansCompared on disk health monitoring software
- Free plan
- Yes
- SMART monitoring
- Yes
- SSD wear tracking
- Yes
- Temperature alerts
- Yes
- Failure warnings
- Yes
- Remote monitoring
- No
- Supported platforms
- Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista
