Bootable Drive Health Check
Assess any drive's true condition before you resell, recycle, or wipe it. Boot the ITAD Tools menu and run a read-only SMART analysis — power-on hours, reallocated sectors, temperature, read/write error rates, and SSD wear level — to grade every drive accurately. Nothing is written, nothing is erased.
Download the Free Bootable Health Checker
No account required — download a ready-to-boot image, boot the target machine, and run any tool from the menu. Want results tied to your organization automatically? Create a free account for an API key and downloadable certificates — otherwise results are claimable later with a verification code.
Already run iPXE? Chain-boot with no download:
chain https://www.itadtools.com/pxe/boot.ipxe
How It Works
A read-only check you can run on every drive that comes through the door
Boot the Toolkit
Chain-boot the ITAD Tools menu over the network, or boot from an ISO/USB/EFI image. No installation on the target device.
Select Health Check
Choose "Drive Health Check," then pick Quick (SMART attributes) or Full (SMART plus a built-in short self-test).
Read SMART Data
It reads each detected drive's SMART telemetry and overall health status — without writing a single byte to the media.
Grade & Decide
Use the results to grade the drive: resell, wipe and redeploy, or recycle — with the data tied back to your organization.
What the Health Check Reports
The signals that actually determine a used drive's value and remaining life
- Power-on hours — how much the drive has actually been used, the single best proxy for age and wear.
- Reallocated sectors — remapped bad blocks; a rising count is an early warning of impending HDD failure.
- Temperature history — whether the drive has been run hot, which shortens lifespan.
- Read/write error rates — surfacing media or interface problems before the drive ships.
- SSD wear level — estimated flash endurance consumed, the key health metric for solid-state drives.
- Overall health status — a pass/fail summary from the drive's own SMART self-assessment.
Quick or Full
Trade depth for speed depending on how you process volume
Quick Health Check
Reads the drive's current SMART attributes and overall health status in seconds. Ideal for fast triage of high volumes of incoming inventory.
Full Health Check
Adds the drive's built-in short self-test on top of the SMART read for a deeper assessment of read integrity. A few minutes per drive.
Grade Accurately, Sell Confidently
Price by condition
Power-on hours and wear level let you price drives by their real remaining life instead of guessing — and defend that grade to buyers.
Catch failures early
Spot drives with reallocated sectors or failing self-tests before they ship, cutting returns and protecting your reputation.
Decide wipe vs destroy
A failing drive that can't be reliably wiped is a candidate for physical destruction. Health-check first, then route it to the right process — including a secure wipe.
How to Run It
It's one entry in the ITAD Tools boot menu
Boot the target device with the ITAD Tools media, then choose "Drive Health Check" from the menu. To chain-boot from an existing iPXE setup:
See the Boot Tools overview for boot-media downloads, organization API keys, and the full menu.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the health check erase any data?
No. The drive health check is strictly read-only. It reads SMART attributes (and optionally runs the drive's built-in short self-test) without writing to or erasing any data. Use it to decide what to do with a drive before you wipe or destroy it.
Does it work on both HDDs and SSDs?
Yes. It reads SMART data from traditional hard drives and solid-state drives. For SSDs it also surfaces wear-level indicators (such as remaining endurance), which are the most useful signal of a flash drive's remaining life.
What is the difference between the Quick and Full checks?
Quick reads the drive's current SMART attributes and returns in seconds. Full additionally launches the drive's built-in short self-test for a more thorough assessment of read integrity, which takes a few minutes per drive.
What do reallocated sectors and wear level tell me?
Reallocated sectors are bad blocks the drive has remapped; a rising count is an early warning of HDD failure. SSD wear level estimates how much of the flash endurance has been consumed. Together with power-on hours and error rates, they let you grade a drive as resaleable, wipe-and-redeploy, or recycle.
Does it need internet access?
Yes. Like the rest of the toolkit, the boot environment connects to itadtools.com over HTTPS to load the tool and record results against your organization. The device needs a wired Ethernet connection; Wi-Fi is not supported in the boot environment.