Softworld editor's review -
Check out and improve the performance of your hard drive
Hard Disk Sentinel is a very clever utility with which you can optimize the performance of your hard drive and find out various information about it.
Installing the application is certainly a process that doesn't take lots of time. The moment you start the program on the screen of your monitor appears a very nice interface which is clear and very well organized.
On the default page of the program, Overview, you are provided general information about the hard drive that is installed on your computer such as temperature, the number of partitions, level of performance etc.
Also on this page can be seen all the CD/DVD devices and various external drives that are installed.
What i liked a lot on the Overview page is that you can see the estimated remaining life time of your hard drive and for how long the device has functioned up to the present time.
I have to point out that all this info is available for all the drives that are installed.
Now going to the Temperature field, here can be seen in detail, information about the temperatures at which your drive operates.
There are displayed the current, average and maximum temperatures. Also you can see that maximum value that your hard drive has achieved during its entire lifespan.
In the SMART module are displayed various values at which normally your hard drive should operate.
Other two fields that i found to be very interesting were Information and Disk Performance. In Information as you can guess can be seen detailed info about your drive and in Disk Performance the current speed at which your device runs.
What i like a lot about the program is that the moment you minimize it, in system tray appears an icon that shows the current temperature of your main drive.
If you want to check out the temperature of other devices you just need to press Status Window. What i don't like about this is that the graphics are not great.
The letters in the window look very strange and certainly that it doesn't go very well with the latest Windows operating system. Maybe with Windows Xp but certainly not with 7.
At the top of the main interface right next to the "Status Window", there are several tests and settings that can be made to your hard disk.
You can set the acoustic level, make random seek, surface and general hard disk tests. In surface test basically you can analyze the writing and reading capabilities of your drive.
Going to Configuration, here you have available a wide variety of settings and options. You can make the program to be launched the moment Windows starts, set alerts, register and update the application and numerous others.
For those that encounter difficulties in using this utility there is available a very useful help section.
Overall i must say that i like Hard Disk Sentinel. It has a nice interface, some really cool tests and it offers detailed info about your hard drive.
Good:
-good looking and user friendly interface
-lots and lots of useful info about your hard drive
-excellent tests that reveal the real capabilities of your drive
Bad:
-the "Status Window" doesn't have nice graphics
Version 3.60 reviewed on: 05 Jul 2011
Publisher's description
Hard disk drive and SSD health, temperature monitoring, failure prevention
Detect Hard Drive Issues Before Catastrophe Strikes
The work that you do on your computer is extremely important, so why leave potential hard drive issues up to fate? By the time your system starts behaving strangely or making odd noises, it may be too late to save your data! With Hard Disk Sentinel, you'll always have a complete overview of your hard drive's health, so you can spot potential problems before they result in an irrecoverable data catastrophe.
Hard Disk Sentinel is your key to identifying, testing, diagnosing, and repairing hard drive problems, even with Solid State Drives.
With Hard Disk Sentinel, you can instantly see reports detailing the total health of your drive, including temperature, self-monitoring data, transfer speeds, and more. Any deviation in these factors could be an early warning sign of impending drive failure!
Hard Disk Sentinel also works on hard disks that are being used in external USB or e-SATA enclosures and RAID controllers.
If your data is important, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of Hard Disk Sentinel today!
Boasting the most sensitive disk health rating system ever, Hard Disk Sentinel Professional will let you know about potential issues far sooner than any other program on the market today. You even enjoy the benefit of having automatic and scheduled disk backup options, which can work quickly to preserve your valuable bytes.
Award-winning Hard Disk Sentinel Professional offers complete data protection solution for all installed storage devices. No need to use separate tools to verify internal hard disks, external hard disks, SSDs, disks in RAID arrays as these are all included in a single software.
Key features:
Constant disk monitoring
Disk tests to fix problems
Alerts
Scheduled and automatic backup functions (PRO version)
Remote monitoring, advanced disk control and mangement features
Free life-of-product technical support and help
Lifetime License - no update or subsricption costs
Changes on the new version:Portable version, Online Warranty Check, option to change data folder location, add tag for hard disk drives. Improved hard disk, SSD, RAID controller and USB docking station support, SSD-specific functions added (for example reset workload counters)
