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Introduction
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An unexpected hard drive failure is one of the worst things that can happen to your PC. You may not only lose your disk drive, but permanently lose all the data on the drive. For many users this can be totally disastrous. Many hard drive crashes are random however some are predictable. That's because almost all modern drives implement a monitoring technology called S.M.A.R.T (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) that continuously passes readings on the hard drive condition to the computer's BIOS. Up to 30 drive parameters can be monitored by SMART including read and write error rates, seek error rate, spin up time, temperature and more. To analyze this mass of data you need a special hard disk health monitoring program. Such programs can give you valuable advance warning that your hard drive is about to fail. This should give you time to backup your critical data and start looking for a replacement drive. Most of these monitoring programs are commercial products with some selling for up to $199, however there are several capable free programs available. |
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Discussion
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It all sounds very nice but such predictions are quite fuzzy, so they are at best a guide. Also, predictions can only be made if a trend is measured. Most drives have no such orderly trend. That's why DiskCheckup almost always indicates "N.A" for the TEC. Besides, to measure a trend the product needs to be always running and not all users want that. There is another reservation: it doesn't recognize USB drives. To my knowledge SMART analysis is not available for USB drives but DiskCheckup doesn't even recognize your USB drives.
If you want to continuously monitor your disk drive condition Active HD Monitor would be my top recommendation. Many users however, would be happy with spot checks. For that application HD Tune should be considered. It will do the job perfectly well and you'll get a competent drive benchmarking utility as well.
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Related Products and Links
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| There is an Open Source Project called S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools that offers two programs to control and monitor storage systems using SMART. This was originally a Linux project but there is a Windows version. This one is really for sysadmins, not end-users. |
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This software category is in need of an editor. If you are interested in taking it over, please email Elizabeth, our editorial co-ordinator with a little bit about your background and in particular, whether you have any commercial affiliation with products in this category. If you are currently logged in, you can contact Elizabeth directly by clicking here, if not then click here. |
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Anything that detects partitioned RAID volumes made of SATA Drives properly?
I need something that at least monitors the temperature and disk load.
Edit
Nevermind, I found out that I can only use Nvidia MediaShield for my RAID drives because of the SATA RAID controller built in my nForce motherboard. Had to dig for it within the provided drivers cd, the main setup utility sucked.
Shouldn't HD Tune be listed as "Feature-Restricted Freeware"? HD Tune is the feature restricted version of HD Tune Pro, which does act as a Disk Monitor etc.
Bravo!!
I love this article
SPEEDFAN monitors temps, SMART attribs of hdd's as well
Nifty little thing.
ThreatExpert.com reports this about Active@ HD Monitor ...
----------------------------------------------------------
The following threats are known to be associated with the file "diskmonitor.exe":
Threat Alias Number of Incidents
Email-Worm.NetSky!sd5 [PC Tools] 1
Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky [Ikarus] 1
Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.dcz [Kaspersky Lab] 1
W32.Netsky@mm [Symantec] 1
W32/Netsky@MM [McAfee] 1
W32/Netsky-AT [Sophos] 1
Win32/Netsky.worm.29184 [AhnLab] 1
Worm:Win32/Netsky.N@mm [Microsoft] 1
WORM_NETSKY.X [Trend Micro] 1
--------------------------------------------------------------
thoughts ... comments ... ?
There are FREE programs that can access smart data on the EXTERNAL hard drives and perhaps even more ;) I hope the reviewer will have time to check them out.
CrystalDiskInfo
HDDScan
Further update to my previous comment about not supporting the recommendation for Active @ Hard Disk Monitor:
I tried their technical support and although they did respond, could find no reason why their software would describe my disks as "Smart not supported" and "Smart disabled".
I have installed and tested every other SMART monitor I could find and this one was the only one that didn't function - at all, as far as SMART monitoring was concerned.
HDD Health, HDD Tune, Smartmontools, DiskCheckup etc all worked perfectly and reported and displayed the SMART information. All things being equal, I can only assume that Active HD Monitor does something or works in some way the others don't - either way, this is rather critical: any software that is designed to help monitor and possibly even pre warn of hard disk failure, should be stable and reliable.
I really wanted to like Active's offering, as in all other respects it is well designed and well featured. However, after testing on Vista 64bit & 32bit and XP 32bit (on which it did appear to work) I noticed that it describes the temperature as a "Performance Attribute" and not a "Health Attribute". As drive temperature is critical to drive health it seems very odd not to monitor it and give it corresponding "Status" information?
If these major issues were resolved, Actives product could indeed be a top pick.
I am afraid I can not agree with the recommendation for Active HD Monitor: this is due to the fact that after downloading and installing it will not give me basic temperature informatiion for my Western Digital and Samsung Spinpoint hard disk drives.
Maybe I am doing something wrong - but it appears that the software does not recognise the data from the disks, where other products like HDD Tune do...it just describes each disk as 'SMART not supported' and 'SMART disabled'.
Thoigh clearly, SMART is enabled on these disks and in the BIOS and other products can read this information, FYI.
Are there any HDD monitor that can shutdown automaticaly when reach certain temp?
Do anyone have some HDD Monitor which can shutdown/logout computer when temp reached(and also freeware)?
Can you tell me where?
Thank you
Again:
Yes, look at HDD Thermomether:
http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/windows/HDD-Thermometer-Review-33308.sh...
Hello.
Like someone asked below, I also need a tool to check for errors on the hard drives. Well, not only the bad sectors, there are plenty of tools that does that.
I'm really searching for a program that does integrity checks on hard drives, similar to the command chkdsk. And it would be best to also have a command-line version, because if your system crashes and you get your windows corrupted, you will want to run a integrity check to attempt fixing it. Seems impossible but I couldn't find any other program!
Can you post something about this subject?
Hello.
What about disk integrety checks?
I've been searching the sie for a chkdsk like program but could.
These seem to be directed for monitoring and predicting failure. But what if people only come to you if failure already occured?
I have a few tools that do a surface scan, both for windows and for dos. But when the errors aren't phisical thenwe need something like chkdsk.
For example, if power shut occurs on windows boot, you might get a corrupted bootup system. Won't be able to run windows chkdsk and it could be just enough to fix the problem.
Or, in my case, I run chkdsk and it reports errors that must be scheduled to be fixed on windows startup because windows is currently using the drive. But after running at startup, chkdsk founds no errors, but if I run it gain with windows loaded it finds errors again. In this case I might want to ry a different software for checking.
I couldn't find any on this fine site. Did I missed i? If there is none, please someone tell me about a software that does this please.
I tryed one ntfschk I think from winternals, its a coomandline one, but always returns exception, no matter what program I use to mount the ntfs drive in dos.
Thank you!
If you need to do a hard drive surface scan, then you can try Ariolic Disk Scanner http://www.ariolic.com/disk-scanner.html
It's free and portable.
Active@ Hard Disk Monitor joins the party:
http://www.ntfs.com/disk-monitor.htm
When Google released their report on the failed hard drives in their huge farms, it was interesting to note that there was no significant difference between hard drives that were SMART enabled, and those that were not. Hard drives still failed without warning.
HDD Health is free for personal use only. When you install it and look in menu in About, there it is written, you can order it here.
Correction: HD Tune IS portable, just install it to wherever you want and run the exe.
Seagate has an excellent little tool at their website - you can create
a DOS bootable diskette that will run the drive self test on any drive
and will also check for bad sectors. I have used it many times with
very good results. Beware there is an option to zero your drive.
It is clearly marked and does prompt for confirmation, however.
Western Digital has a similar tool at their site, but it will only work
on their own drives.
is there a tool you can run from a dos boot disk when the hd is detected in bios but not from an xp boot cd?
There is NTFSDOS (don't think it is freeware)..
Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (you will have to use Bart's PE Builder)..
Winternals ERD (Not freeware)..
HTH,
Kent
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