For MacOS (where realistically you’d be doing this for an external drive as I believe they don’t show you much or anything at all on modern internal drives) you can get a free trial of DriveDX. There are probably other programs you can use for free, but if you only need to do it once, just get that because it does a really good job of letting you know what’s up. Just visualizes things in an easily newbie-understandable way.
How does one test for this?
Since the other answer is desktop use, if in Linux your best bet is
smartctl.There are several programs that can check for disk info (S.M.A.R.T), so I’ll lay out some options for you
CrystalDiskInfo is free to use on Windows
For Linux, you can choose something from the list here depending on preferences like your current desktop environment
For MacOS (where realistically you’d be doing this for an external drive as I believe they don’t show you much or anything at all on modern internal drives) you can get a free trial of DriveDX. There are probably other programs you can use for free, but if you only need to do it once, just get that because it does a really good job of letting you know what’s up. Just visualizes things in an easily newbie-understandable way.
There are programs that can check such things as runtime, wear (…).