This article studies the stator windings asymmetry fault in direct-drive permanent magnet synchronous generator(PMSG)-based wind turbines (WTs), having passive converters at the generator side, through developing a power-hardware-in-the-loop (P-H-i-L) system. It is based on a digital real-time simulation (DRTS) of turbine blades, a wind generator in the abc reference frame, and a three-phase diode rectifier mathematical models. The DC voltage, provided by the model of the three-phase diode rectifier, is linked to a one-level hardware boost converter by using a programmable DC power supply. Furthermore, the maximum power point tracking technique, based on the optimal torque, is evaluated when the one-level boost converter supplies a resistive load. Stator windings asymmetry fault in the PMSG is identified by analyzing the rectifier output voltage, the rotor speed, and the electrical signatures of the boost converter. It shows that this kind of fault clearly gives rise to the amplitudes of both 2·fs and 4·fs frequency components in the mentioned signatures, where fs is the main frequency component of the stator current. DRTSs are compared with digital offline simulations (DoSs), based on a Matlab/Simulink Simscape physical model, to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework.