Monitoring Hard Drive Health
Written by Alan Wednesday, 4 August 2010 08:00
As much as I stress to everyone about having a good backup plan in place and using it, I know that many users don’t listen. So it’s inevitable that one that user’s hard drive will die and data, possibly even very important data, will be lost. Hard drive monitoring software is not a substitute for backup, but at least it give you fair warning when your PC is about to go south. Of course sudden disasters can still strike – a power surge, for instance, can zap a drive in a blink. That being said, I still recommend having a monitoring utility to keep an eye on things.
I decided to take a look at three of the free ones available.
HDD Health
HDD Health, from Pantersoft, has a very simple interface. It sits in the system tray and monitors all drives, including USB drives. It will pop up a warning if it senses an approaching problem in any of the parameters it monitors.
HD Tune
HD Tune, available here, gives an extra feature in addition to monitoring drive health. It also monitors your drive’s performance. The personal version is available for free or you can get extra feature in the pro version for $34.95 US.
DiskCheckup
DiskCheckup, from Passmark, also is free for personal use, but charges $15.00 US for a commercial license. It does a decent enough job, but can’t monitor USB drives, which is a drawback.
All of the utilities I have looked at here are compatible with all versions of Windows from XP to 7. They are all pretty similar. I like the simple interface of HDD Health best and was slightly put off by DiskCheckup’s inability to monitor USB drives. I will be using HDD Health from now on, but you won’t have any problems if you choose one of the others.
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