How to get warned when your drive's health gets worse

Warnings about a declining drive need no setting up in Pulse by Zaweba, because its drive health alert is switched on from the start. When a drive's SMART health gets worse, Pulse sends a Windows notification from its tray icon once and records it in the alert log on the Alerts page. All you need to do is leave the option on and keep Pulse running.

Drives rarely fail with a fanfare. The early signs are tucked away in their health data, where most people never look. An alert brings them to you.

What counts as getting worse

The alert watches for four kinds of decline. A critical warning is the drive itself flagging a problem. New media errors or reallocated sectors mean areas of the drive have failed to read or write, or have been swapped for spares. Spare capacity below its threshold means the drive's reserve for replacing worn areas is running low. And 90 per cent of rated life used means an SSD is close to the end of the writing it was designed for.

Each is a reason to make sure your backups are current. None of them means the drive will stop tomorrow, but together they are the best early warning you'll get.

Checking the alert is on

Open the Alerts page from the View menu or with Ctrl+4. The option for a drive whose SMART health declines is on by default, so unless you've turned it off there is nothing to change. Alongside it you'll see the other alerts Pulse offers: temperatures, memory and daily data per app.

Pulse has to be running to notice anything. Closing the main window keeps it in the tray, and the "Start Pulse when I sign in" setting starts it in the tray every time you log in. It is light in the background, about 0.1 per cent CPU on the test PC.

Which drives are covered

NVMe drives are read without administrator rights, so they are covered from the moment Pulse starts. SATA drives and drives in USB cases need the optional sensor helper. Turn on Settings > Sensor readings, or use the button on the Temperatures page, and Windows asks for permission to start a small helper. It only reads sensors, sends them to Pulse every two seconds over a private connection, accepts no commands and stops when Pulse closes.

If you have an older SATA drive and haven't turned on the helper, Pulse can't watch its health, so it's worth doing for any drive holding files you care about.

When a notification arrives

Each alert fires once and then re-arms when things return to normal, so you won't be nagged repeatedly about the same reading. The log keeps the date, time and message, and drive alerts are highlighted as warnings, so you can find them later even if you missed the pop-up.

Open the Temperatures page (Ctrl+2) and look at the Drive health group for that drive to see which figure changed. Then back up anything you can't replace, straight away. After that, plan a replacement drive. Keep an eye on the figures in the meantime; a single new error may stay single, while a steady climb means time is short.

Pulse by Zaweba can't mend a drive, and no tool can promise a drive won't fail without warning. What it does is make sure that when the drive does give a warning, you hear it.