Free hard drive monitoring utility - Hard Drive Monitor

A free hard drive diagnostic tool, Hard Drive Monitor, is going to perform ongoing testing and performance verification for all hard drives in your computer. It will show you one detailed report about your hard drives health condition, including drive status, all useful information, spin-up time, drive temperature and more, all updated in real time. Utility will also show one hard drive thermometer in your PC desktop tray, giving you the information visible and handy so you will be able to predict your Hard Drives failures and act preventively upon to secure your important data.

Key program features

1. Tiny monitoring utility, use a small amount of resources itself;
2. No need install, you can launch it from one USB Flash disk;
3. Show you drive temperature in real time (run as a little icon in your system tray);
4. Support multi hard drives;
5. Free tool, freeware and easy to use;
6. Support all Windows OS, include Windows Vista 64bits and Windows 7;
   

Why you need one Hard Drive Monitor?

Vast majority of the PC users are saving the most important files and data on their hard disks, as the most reliable types of permanent storage. This utility is designed to take care of these hard drives, supporting reading and monitoring S.M.A.R.T. data.

While you run some big data operations on your disk for a long time, your hard drive will eventually heat up. Once the drive temperature rises over certain critical point, the drive operation becomes dangerous. This program by any means is not data recovery software, but it can help you to monitor all your hard disks, and react quickly before you may experience hardware failure. It is a free and handy HDD diagnostic utility for your everyday use.

About S.M.A.R.T.

S.M.A.R.T. is acronym for "Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology" (sometimes written as SMART). It allows monitoring computer hard disks to detect and report on various indicators of reliability. All major Hard Drives manufacturers support one or more S.M.A.R.T. attributes in various products, such as Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi (HGST), Fujitsu, Maxtor (purchased by Seagate), and Western Digital.

Author’s website: http://harddrivemonitor.com/

Direct downloading link: http://harddrivemonitor.com/harddrivemonitor.exe

Free Hard Drive Monitor from Pulse Solutions

The Free Hard Drive Monitor software is a simple application that generates email alerts for impending hard drive problem due to low hard drive space, hard drive hardware failure, hard drive corruption and a host of other hard drive problems that windows automatically logs.

Hard drive monitoring is crucial for any user or corporation, especially for the servers and critical computers. This application has a very small foot print and can reside on any windows operating system working silently and efficiently in detecting hard drive related problems and emailing them to you automatically.

The Free Hard Drive Monitor was created when Pulse Engineers could not find an off the shelf software that could simply check for basic Hard drive problems and send them an email so they could rectify issues before they become problems. The software is less than 1000 lines of code, it works in a simple and stable fashion doing just what it’s supposed to do, look for hard drive errors periodically and sending out emails with as much detail as possible.

The application has no user interface, it simply emails the alerts as and when they occur. The current version checks for the available space, SMART variables described below and Hard drive errors caught from Windows Event log. This basically includes all accurate ways of predicting server failure due to hard drive problems.

The hard drive monitor has been built with .Net 2.0 for Pulse engineers and is currently monitoring 100s of critical web servers.

The latest version features SMART Hard drive monitoring features as well!

Smart Hard drive variables that the software detects and reports on

• Raw_Read_Error_Rate: Indicates the rate of hardware read errors that occurred when reading data from a disk surface.
• Throughput Performance: Overall (general) throughput performance of a hard disk drive.
• Spin-Up Time: Average time of spindle spin up (from zero RPM to fully operational [millisecs]).
• Start/Stop Count: A tally of spindle start/stop cycles.
• Reallocated Sectors Count: Count of reallocated sectors.
• Seek Error Rate: Rate of seek errors of the magnetic heads.
• Power-On Hours (POH): Count of hours in power-on state.
• Spin-Up Time: Average time of spindle spin up (from zero RPM to fully operational [millisecs]).
• Spin Retry Count: Count of retry of spin start attempts.
• Recalibration Retries: This attribute indicates the number of times recalibration was requested (under the condition that the first attempt was unsuccessful).
• Device Power Cycle Count: This attribute indicates the count of full hard disk power on/off cycles.
• Power-On Hours (POH): Count of hours in power-on state.
• Soft Read Error Rate: Uncorrected read errors reported to the operating system. If the value is non-zero, you should back up your data.
• Spin Retry Count: Count of retry of spin start attempts.
• Temperature Difference from 100: Value is equal to (100 – temp. °C), allowing manufacturer to set a minimum threshold which corresponds to a maximum temperature.
• Load/Unload Cycle: Count of load/unload cycles into head landing zone position.
• Soft Read Error Rate: Uncorrected read errors reported to the operating system. If the value is non-zero, you should back up your data.
• Temperature: Current internal temperature.
• Hardware ECC Recovered: Time between ECC-corrected errors.
• Soft Read Error Rate: Uncorrected read errors reported to the operating system. If the value is non-zero, you should back up your data.
• Reallocation Event Count: Count of remap operations. The raw value of this attribute shows the total number of attempts to transfer data from reallocated sectors to a spare area. Both successful & unsuccessful attempts are counted.
• Current Pending Sector Count: Number of "unstable" sectors (waiting to be remapped). If the unstable sector is subsequently written or read successfully, this value is decreased and the sector is not remapped. Read errors on the sector will not remap the sector, it will only be remapped on a failed write attempt.
• Uncorrectable Sector Count: The total number of uncorrectable errors when reading/writing a sector.
• Soft Read Error Rate: Uncorrected read errors reported to the operating system. If the value is non-zero, you should back up your data.
• UltraDMA CRC Error Count: The number of errors in data transfer via the interface cable as determined by ICRC (Interface Cyclic Redundancy Check).
• Write Error Rate: The total number of errors when writing a sector.
• G-Sense Error Rate: The number of errors resulting from externally-induced shock & vibration.
• Soft Read Error Rate: Uncorrected read errors reported to the operating system. If the value is non-zero, you should back up your data.
• Power-Off Retract Cycle: The number of times the magnetic armature was retracted automatically as a result of cutting power.
• Write Error Rate: The total number of errors when writing a sector.

Website: http://www.pulsesolutions.com/hard-drive-monitor.aspx

How to Predict Hard Drive Failure with HDD Health?

HDD Health is a full-featured failure-prediction agent for machines using Windows. Sitting in the system tray, it monitors hard disks and alerts you to impending failure.

The program uses Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) built into all new hard disks, and can predict failures on your hard drives. A host of alerting features include email, local pop-up messages, net messages, and event logging, while using no system resources.

Simplified, it looks like the HDD is continuously making self-tests and calculating some "attributes", which reflect the current state of efficiency and status of the HDD. Each attribute means some detail in HDD status C total hours of work, count of read errors, and others. If after a self-test, the HDD "thinks" that its state is changed, it changes the value of the corresponding attribute.

For example, if the time of spin-up from idle state changed, the HDD would change (lower) the value of the "Spin-Up Time" attribute. Each attribute has a threshold (lower) value and, at achievement, the HDD may stop working.

HDD Health monitors attribute changes, analyzes speed of falling (lowering), and calculates remaining time of life HDD based on this data. The drive health status can be observed in percents in the main window of HDD Health.

You can even setup HDD Health to alert you in case of critical drive health conditions. In order to do so, follow the steps below:

1.) Open HDD Health.

2.) Navigate to File –> Options.

3.) Under Options, check the notification checkbox for Critical Drive Health. Select the checkbox for Popup and Sound.

Once you have selected the above option, HDD Health will alert you of any critical health issues for your hard disk by playing a sound and popping an alert.

System Requirements

* A computer running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT4,

Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Vista

* Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 SP1 or later recommended.

* Approximately 2MB of free hard disk space.

Website: http://www.panterasoft.com/

Note that the software, posted on the developers’ website is not portable, and does require installation on the hard drive. I could also locate the portable version of this utility, which can be downloaded here. Simply extract the archive and copy at any location on the external drive you intend to launch it from.