Aiming at the problems of long transient time and large torque ripple in steady state in PI controller and traditional sliding mode method of switched reluctance motor, this paper proposes a control method based on adaptive reaching law and disturbance observer. Firstly, state variables are introduced to construct nonsingular fast terminal sliding surface to improve the convergence time of the system. Secondly, the inherent chattering of the traditional exponential reaching law is analyzed, and an adaptive reaching law algorithm is designed to reduce the system chattering. Then a nonlinear disturbance observer is designed according to the disturbance change, and the observed disturbance value is compensated to the sliding mode controller as a feedforward signal. Finally, compared with the traditional sliding mode control, the proposed control strategy is verified. The results show that the response time is shortened by 0.08 s and 0.4 s respectively in the start-up stage of simulation and experiment, and the speed tracking without overshoot is realized. In the loading stage, the speed decrease is reduced by 19.9%, 9.2%, 7% and 2.9% respectively, and the output torque fluctuation of the motor at steady state is reduced, and the torque ripple is reduced by about 10%.