Storage & drive health
A dying drive corrupts your data without warning. CrystalDiskInfo reads the drive's own self-diagnostics (S.M.A.R.T.) in seconds, so you know exactly how much life is left — and whether it's the SSD the listing promised.
Run CrystalDiskInfo Critical
Run CrystalDiskInfo from your USB stick (a portable build needs no install). Get it from crystalmark.info. It opens straight onto the drive's health.
The official installer offers optional extras during setup — untick any bundled offers, or use the portable .zip version to avoid them entirely.
Read Health Status & key attributes Critical
The big Health Status box (top-left) is colour-coded:
| Status | Meaning | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Good (blue/green) | Drive reports healthy | Proceed |
| Caution (yellow) | One or more attributes degraded | Risky — discount or pass |
| Bad (red) | Drive is failing | Walk away |
Then check these specific values:
- Health % (SSDs): remaining life. 90%+ is excellent, below ~80% means it's been worked hard.
- Power On Hours: total runtime. Helps gauge real age vs. the "barely used" claim — 20,000+ hours is a heavily used drive.
- Power On Count: how many times it's been switched on.
- Reallocated Sectors / Pending Sectors: should be 0. Any non-zero (especially yellow) = early failure.
- Temperature: should be sensible (roughly 25–50 °C idle).
Negotiation lever: high power-on hours or a low SSD health % rarely stop a sale on their own, but they're solid grounds to negotiate — they prove real age and wear no matter how clean the laptop looks. Note the figures and factor a possible new SSD into your offer.
Confirm drive type, size & free space Important
CrystalDiskInfo names the exact model and interface (NVMe / SATA SSD / HDD). Cross-check the capacity in Command Prompt:
> wmic diskdrive get model,size,mediaType
On newer Windows where wmic is removed, use PowerShell instead:
> Get-PhysicalDisk | Select FriendlyName, MediaType,
@{n='SizeGB';e={[math]::round($_.Size/1GB)}}, HealthStatus
- Confirm it's an SSD if you were promised one (HDDs are far slower — and a common bait-and-switch).
- Confirm the capacity matches the listing.
- Open This PC to see free space and that the drive isn't almost full of someone else's data.
Optional: built-in error scan Nice to have
For a quick read-only scan of the system drive (a full /f repair takes long and may need a reboot, so skip that during a sale):
> chkdsk C:
It reports bad sectors and file-system errors without changing anything. You can also open Optimize Drives (Start → "Defragment") to see drive type and last-optimised status.
Storage is one of the cheapest, easiest parts to upgrade later — so a small or slow drive on an otherwise great laptop is a fair haggling point, not a deal-breaker.