If you need to obtain detailed information on a Western Digital (WD) hard disk drive (HDD) or run a diagnostic test on a drive, you can use the free Western Digital Dashboard diagnostic tool from Western Digital. You can also use the program to update the firmware for a drive.
When you first run the program, you will see a My Devices window displaying the Western Digital drives the software has found, both USB-attached and internal disk drives. Other storage media will be shown under Other Devices.
Click on the Western Digital drive you wish to check on to see details on that drive including disk space used, disk space available, and disk space capacity as well as the interface speed, drive temperature, health, and performance information.
If you click on Tools on the left side of the window, under Diagnostic, you will see a S.M.A.R.T. area. The abbreviation stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, which is also sometimes abbreviated as "SMART". If you click on the "click here" link in "To view S.M.A.R.T. data in detail click here", you can view details on the drive, such as the Reassigned Sector Count, Power-On Hours Count, Drive Power Cycle Count, Temperature, and SATA/PCIe CRC Error Count.
You can also choose to run either a short or extended S.M.A.R.T diagnostic test to detect any issues with drive health.
If you choose to run a test, you will see a message that "The application will not allow further activity while this operation runs, but you may cancel at any time. Would you like to continue?"
You can use other programs while the test is running, but you won't be able to do anything else in the Western Digital Dashboard program. If the test completes without any problems being detected, you should see a message stating "No problems were detected.
