Track activity of your HDDs and their temperature, prevent damage to the disks. The program shows all partitions, assesses their free space, health status, shows performance stats (read and written data, transfer rate, disk activity) and the temperature of the disk (current, maximum, and day's average). Has customizable hotkeys, messages, and alerts.
Hard Disk Sentinel was created to help Windows users to analyze and monitor the performance of their disks. The program is compatible with a wide variety of data storage containers, provides you with detailed information about the performance of your disks, and enables you to export or share the given reports with just a few clicks.
Simply select the disk you wish to analyze and the utility will provide you with the report you need. You will learn details about the disk's health status, its temperature, the current transfer rate, and many others.
The only time the program didn't work well was when I tried to analyze the performance of a USB stick. For some reason, the utility failed to identify the connected device and reveal the disk health info I needed. This was a singular event as the tool displayed plenty of useful details regarding the rest of the connected data storage containers.
Another thing you need to consider is that, even though it comes with a help guide and an intuitive interface, it might not be suitable for beginner PC users. Some of the offered information indicates that the users needs to have a certain level of knowledge regarding hard disk properties and functioning.
Briefly, this Windows utility helps you prevent data loss due to hard disk problems and provides you with detailed info about your local and external drives. So, it's worth giving it a try if none of the aforementioned flaws mean anything to you.
v4.3 [Feb 22, 2013]
-important update for hard disks / SSDs connected to motherboards with Intel chipsets
-important update for multi-drive enclosures (port multiplier and RAID enclosures)
-important update for various SSDs (Corsair Force GT SSDs, Samsung SSDs, etc.)
-display progress (% complete) on application button during hard disk surface test
-improved support of VANTEX HX4R, Chieftec, Sans Digital external RAID enclosures
-improved support for LSI SAS/SATA RAID controllers and DELL SAS/SATA RAID controllers
-improved support and health detection for various Seagate hard disks, for example Seagate Thin hard disks and Seagate hard disks with special firmware
-improved support for Areca RAID controllers, accessing hard disks and SSDs in different connected enclosures, displaying enclosure number and slot number
-improved support of JMicron JMB36X / Gigabyte GBB36X / HighPoint / VIA RAID controllers under Windows 2003
-added support for newer WD hard disk (WD RED, WD Enterprise RE, etc.)
-support of HighPoint 4522 RAID controller: detecting and displaying connected SATA hard disks (standalone and configured as RAID)
-fixed periodic false alarms reported by older Intel chipset drivers (providing invalid S.M.A.R.T. information)
-fixed invalid S.M.A.R.T. information reported by LSI SAS RAID controllers for standalone (non-RAID) SATA drives
-fixed display of volume labels in hard disk selector (upper left area) if one or more partitions have no assigned logical drive letter
-general improvements for Chinese language, fixed hard disk temperature symbol in Sidebar Gadget when Chinese language used
-fixed warranty check for Samsung hard disk drives
-fixed startup problem with Drobo enclosures / devices
-improved real time performance graph display
-improved and more stable dynamic DNS update function
Create, extend shrink, resize, move, delete, merge, & hide hard disk partitions
