I installed Hard Disk Monitor, but don't like it for two important reasons.

Firstly, the data it gives is very technical. While it will show if there are problems with a hard drive (or SSD) it won't give an explantion of how serious the issue is. Secondly, when I connected some notebook hard drives to my laptop with a USB cable, it was not able to read the SMART data from them, meaning it could give no information on the condition on the drives.

I usually use Hard Disk Sentinel to do the same job, and it works a lot better. It gives a detailed explanaton of any problems found in plain English, so you can tell if the problems are minor (in which case there is probably no need to replace the drive just yet), or serious (in which case you should replace the drive as soon as possible as it may fail soon), which is of course, very useful to know. Also, Hard Disk Sentinel was able to read the data from the external drives that Hard Disk Monitor couldn't read from.

You can often get Hard Disk Sentinel as a giveaway. Just do a search for hard disk sentinel giveaway.

Whenever I buy a used hard drive from eBay, I connect it to my laptop, and hard disk sentinel tells me if there are any issues with the drive, and if there are any, I won't use the drive. I can't do this with today's giveaway as it can't read this information from the drives I connect.

If you want a completely free alternative, CrystalDiskInfo, while not giving detailed information like Hard Disk Sentinel does, can at least read the diagnostic data from any hard drives I connect to my laptop.

Roger tarafından yorumlandı  –  8 years ago  –  Bu yorumu yararlı buldunuz mu? evet | hayır (+32)

Çevir

The program seems to not have been updated since 2012, and there's plenty of room for improvement so I don't know whether the developers just decided to settle for what it is or they abandoned the program completely.

For example you can't choose to see SMART data in decimal, there's no logging of SMART attributes over time, hard drive health is badly estimated, the program is not compliant with Windows' theme (select Windows as the style in settings to see), settings are scattered everywhere (e.g. to change the temperature threshold you have to edit the connection settings of the machine), ...

So for a quick fix, and if you don't have anything else around I'd say you could use this program, but I wouldn't recommend it given there are better alternatives to it.

Kao tarafından yorumlandı  –  8 years ago  –  Bu yorumu yararlı buldunuz mu? evet | hayır (+26)

Çevir

Install without problem after jumping through hoops to get the download link via e-mail. Registration requires you to sign up for newsletters from the publisher and confirm your subscription before you get the activation code.

Program doesn't seem to like external drives (shows eSATA and USB connected devices as Not Supported) or SSD's. Out of 9 drives on my system, it could only examine 4. That in itself is a deal breaker for me. SiSoftware 2016 lite is a much more capable program - and it, too, is free.

James Bland tarafından yorumlandı  –  8 years ago  –  Bu yorumu yararlı buldunuz mu? evet | hayır (+22)

Çevir

Totally at a loss as to what to make of this program; first install after exiting and reopening it could not find the hard drive.
Uninstalled, and then reinstall and this time it could find the hard drive but said it was not supported; a Western Digital 1 TB drive.
Did the same again and got the same result, getting no temperature readings not even when requested to be placed in the taskbar.

Hard Disk Sentinel works perfectly on this drive!

The above suggests that the program contains some very serious bugs and therefore I cannot take any information it gives me seriously, uninstalled yet again.

Tata tarafından yorumlandı  –  8 years ago  –  Bu yorumu yararlı buldunuz mu? evet | hayır (+19)

Çevir

Well Svend, the company may know what they are doing, but the Hard Disk Monitor Pro 3.1.9 has a feature missing that renders it useless in my case. It works perfect with fix installed hard disks, but doesn't work with external hard disks via USB connection.

It recognizes the HD, but says that S.M.A.R.T. data, temperature, etc. are NOT supported. That's a big flaw in a program that claims to be a 'Pro' version.

BTW, it's not the USB 3.0 or the HD, because Ashampoo's HDD Control 3.1 supports every external HD just fine. So, consequently, I had to uninstall it again and went back Ashampoo's version.

Hans Maerker tarafından yorumlandı  –  8 years ago  –  Bu yorumu yararlı buldunuz mu? evet | hayır (+16)

Çevir