Hard Disk Sentinel 4.00

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Date updated

February 2, 2012

Developer

HDsentinel | (more products)

Price

$23

All time downloads

6,333

License

Free Trial

Platform

Windows

Our rating

5 / 5

User ratings

Read user reviews (0)

Description of Hard Disk Sentinel 4.00

HDD health, performance and temperature monitoring

Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS HDD/SDD monitoring and analysis application. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair disk drive problems, report and display SDD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the hard disks and solid state disks inside the computer or in an external enclosure (USB / e-SATA). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.

The software monitors hard disk drive / HDD status, including health, temperature and all S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, built in most hard disks and solid state disks today) values for each disks. Also it measures the disk transfer speed in real time which can be used as a benchmark or to detect possible hard disk failures, performance degradations.

HDSentinel is the perfect data protection solution: it can be effectively used to prevent HDD failure and SDD / HDD data loss because it has the most sensitive disk health rating system which is extremely sensitive to disk problems. This way even a small HDD problem can't be missed.

The Professional version has scheduled and automatic (on-problem) disk backup options to prevent data loss caused by not only failure but by malware or accidental delete also.

Key features

• Easy to use interface - All information are displayed in the main window of the application. Quick controls allow easy navigation to access all hard disks, partitions and different information. Intuitive user interface elements display information by using green/yellow/red color to indicate the level of problem. Detailed text description and context sensitive help guides the user thru the features and options.

• 1. Install > 2. Configure > 3. Stay protected - Just install, configure alerts and backup options and your system is now safe. You'll be notified about the problems - but if everything is correct, Hard Disk Sentinel just sits on tray and displays current status. The data is protected 24 hours daily, 7 days a week.

• Instant S.M.A.R.T. analyzing - Hard Disk Sentinel can communicate with IDE, Serial ATA, SCSI and some special USB hard disks to detect their status and temperature. Disk status are displayed immediately as you launch the application, there is no need to analyze disks for a long period. It displays the current and maximum temperature for the hard disk. It reads all general and vendor-specific attributes and monitor their values. For advanced users, all raw data are displayed also including power-on time and number of read/write errors. Hard Disk Sentinel interprets the performance and fitness related S.M.A.R.T. values and displays the calculated Performance and Health percentage, total power on time and estimated lifetime remaining.

• Disk status in Windows Explorer - View the current health status and used space in Windows Explorer or in any other application, so you'll always know the amount of used space for each partitions and the disk condition.

• Information on demand - Current hard disk temperatures and health can be displayed on the system tray, in a small status window and on the desktop itself. Average and maximum temperatures are logged for all hard disks and these information are displayed in graphs for statistical purposes.

• Hard Disk Hardware Testing - By using Hard Disk Sentinel, it is possible to start hardware hard disk self tests. These tests can be used to effectively find all hard disk problems because built-in hardware methods are used to verify hard disk components (for example heads, servo, internal buffer in the Short self test). The Extended self test also verifies the complete disk surface, finds and repairs all "weak" areas and re-allocates the possible bad sectors. This is not possible with the software-based disk surface scan methods (for example, by using scandisk).

• Logging - Hard Disk Sentinel logs all degradations in all SMART parameters. For example, if a new uncorrectable sector is found on your hard disk, you will be notified.

• Alerts - Hard Disk Sentinel can make different kind of alerts upon different problems. It can execute various tasks (even external applications) in case of a problem. There is an option to send daily emails about current status.

• Hard Disk Details - Detects and displays every information about the hard disk, from the revision number and buffer size to all features it has. The maximum available and current transfer modes are also displayed.

• Hard Disk Performance - Logs how much data were read from or written to the hard disk. Displays current transfer rates for both reading and writing and estimates the maximum available (theoretical) transfer rate for a particular hard disk.

• Hard Disk Partitions - Displays partitions for each physical hard disks and type and usage information about them so you cannot run out of space. Hard Disk Sentinel sends this information automatically in alert/status messages.

• Shutdown - It offers option to shut down the computer on failure, overheat or parameter degradation. This option can be used to prevent further data loss.

• Acoustic Management - Offers option to control the acoustic level of IDE/S-ATA hard disk. It is possible to increase performance or make the disks more silent. Unique feature: control the acoustic level of your external USB hard disk (if your USB enclosure is equipped with proper USB-ATA bridge chip which supports this feature).

• Clock Synchronization - It offers option to synchronize the PC clock with an atomic clock via NTP (Network Time Protocol).

• Backup - In the Professional version, wide range of backup methods are available: to backup data to local computer, to a LAN server or to a remote FTP (or to a mail) server. It is even possible to use 3rd party tools to create archives or burn media. Hard Disk Sentinel can manage power status of remote computers in the network.

Requirements for Hard Disk Sentinel 4.00

• Windows operating system (Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, 2008, Vista, Windows 7)
• System administrator account (in service mode, it is possible to use without administrator rights and without even user logged in)
• At least 15 megabytes of hard disk space
• Hard disk with ATA (IDE or Serial ATA/SATA II), SCSI, SAS, USB interface. USB hard disk support depends on the USB-ATA bridge chips. Other type of external disks (USB or IEEE 1394) are NOT supported because the hard disk controller chip in the external enclosure does not support the detection of S.M.A.R.T. Information.

Editor's review for Hard Disk Sentinel

The price of one 1.000 GB HDD 130 USD
The price of your work saved files - hundreds or, maybe, thousands of hours
A solution to guard all this stuff : PRICELESS

This is the way I would describe Hard Disk Sentinel after some days of intensive testing.

Capable of monitoring fixed or portable hard disk drives ( USB ), Hard Disk Sentinel tests, finds and repairs errors and failures that might appear. It is the perfect data protection solution that complete its tasks in real time.
It runs in background, consuming very low resources, detecting and reporting all disks problems. You can watch, in system tray, HDDs temperature and if any errors occur, you will be notified even by sound alerts.
It features also backup capability, clock sync with atomic clock, shutdown on HDD failure for further data loss prevention and HDD testing to prevent unwanted events.
It is hard to imagine, but just for 23$, this amazing application is able to handle its tasks, obtaining the some results as an expensive and resources consuming software.

What is new in version 4.00

Portable version, Online Warranty Check, option to change data folder location, add tag for hard disk drives. Improved hard disk, SSD, RAID controller and USB docking station support, SSD-specific functions added (for example reset workload counters)