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Free Acronis Drive Monitor Warns You Of Impending Hard Drive Failure
Most hard disks available today have a built-in feature called Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, conveniently shortenable to SMART. This helps the operating system keep an eye on the health of the drive, by checking its operating temperature, how long it takes to spin up to full speed, whether it encounters any read errors, and so on.
Acronis has recently launched a free Windows utility called ADM, or Acronis Drive Monitor. It's basically an automatic reporting tool for SMART, which pops up a warning message if a problem is detected within any of your computer's hard drives.
You can download the program at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/drive-monitor/. It works on all versions of Windows from XP onwards (I tried it on Windows 7), and the download size is around 17 MB.
As you might suspect, Drive Monitor is a perfectly usable freeware utility but, deep down, it's also designed to help sell more copies of Acronis's backup programs. So in addition to reporting any hardware problems with your drives, it also conveniently warns you if you haven't bought any Acronis backup software(!). Still, at least it has the decency to run an immediate Acronis backup job if SMART reports an impending drive failure, which might just save your bacon one day.
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Question please; is it going to pop up a warning if the temperature goes over the limit or other parameters? As of now, when I look at those SMART indicators, it is like chinese, except the temperature but the 3 columns damned if they make any sense.
Let's look at Temperature; you see 3 columns, Current 103, Worst 92, Threshold 0, and the big box on upper left corner shows 116 F degrees.
How you interpret these? And the rest are the same.
Thank you
Sorry but we do not provide individual support here in the comments, only in our forum. A user guide is available for this product.
http://www.acronis.com/support/documentation/index.html
you can DISABLE monitoring of Backups, so you dont have any nag about not having done a backup. Here is the image link.
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/4305/acronisdrivemonitorback.gif
( 4 attempts to post )
Downloaded and installed on XP.
Don't use this program if you have drives that are 70% full or more!
It completely shut down an external hard drive which I use for archiving files - I had to do a system restore to excise the program from my system and restore the drive to operational status.
Forget about Acronis, download the portable version of CrystalDiskInfo. Can even read SMART out from a RAID setup (nVidia chipset) which many other SMART software can not handle, and it tells you everything you need to know about the conditions about your drives.
Moderator's Note : Please do not use objectionable language. Things can be said without that. The objectionable material has been edited out.
Latest Build 7046 update release notes for Acronis True Image 2010 Home:
• Integration with Acronis Drive Monitor: Acronis True Image Home
backs up data on a hard drive as soon as there is an alarm on
Acronis Drive Monitor about a potential problem with the drive.
• Autoupdate: Acronis True Image Home automatically checks for a new
version on the Web site every time you run the application.
I found all my other disk monitors agree 100% with Acronis Drive Monitor. All data correlate from each of the alternatives I use; especially Active Hard Disk Monitor, which up until now I prefer, but do like CrystalDiskInfo for its simplicity.
What makes the Acronis Disk Monitor a choice I just can't pass up is the
recent build update that integrates it with Acronis True Image and Backup & Recovery. This is definitely something you want if you already use Acronis True Image. While I have scheduled backups in place, the monitor is added protection in the event of a near disaster.
Thanks again for the posting and notification.
I can't seem to download after entering my datas. What's up?
This software is bogus. It lies. I have a JPG here that's a screen capture of two other SMART monitoring programs and Acronis looking at the same drive. The other two report "100% health" and "no error". Acronis shows 30% health and all kinds of problems. Seems like a fine way to sell backup software, but it's reporting problems that don't exist. People should know. It's a sales scam.
Please do not post your email address on a public forum like this. Its not safe. I have edited out the email address. If you want to share the image, you can upload the image on photo sharing site, like photobucket, and share the link here.
Am now using it on my Win 7 laptop and XP desktop. It immediately alerted me to a problem with my laptop drive and I'll now replace the drive. I thought it was making some weird sounds and this confirms it.
This is my kind of program - simple, effective and totally silent unless there is a problem.
Downloaded and installed on my PC, Vista 32, really bogged down my system.
I'm sure it does what it says it does - SMART reporting isn't rocket science - but I agree that one purpose of this program is to sell Acronis.
CrystalDiskInfo is the best.
In Windows 7 you don't need any external program for SMART reading.
Recently W7 suddenly warned me that one of my disks has excessed one of SMART parameter...
An excellent program to install. Very trustworthy.
Other choices in case you need to verify alerts:
CrystalDiskInfo Very simple, but very good status
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html
Active Hard Disk Monitor Sophisticated and one of the best.
http://www.disk-monitor.com/
DiskCheckup Simple, but advanced Status information.
http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm
Thanks Gizmo. As usual, you find some really good ones.
Howdy,
Yeah Acronis is trustworthy so if it says something is wrong with the drives then I would listen to it.
It might simply just be something like too many reallocated sectors or something like that.
I had a drive that was like this for 3 years before failing. But of course I did regular backups so could afford to let it go.
You could check with another tool like CrystalDisk health info. I use the portable version of this myself.
Cheers,
Paul.
Thanks Paul,I tried crystalDisk and it says all is well.I think Acronis should stick to drive Imaging only eh?
Yep, another beauty brought to you by gizmo. If it aint junk, it's shareware!
Its not a shareware program, its free. Did you even visit the link?
Does anyone know if this is a trustworthy progarm?
I installed the program and it says i have 3 faulty drives! Whereas iolo drive medic and O&O LED 3 says all is well! Maybe it is a ruse to buy Acronis True Image....tut tut.
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