admin Hard Disk Sentinel
Hard Disk Sentinel is an application designed to monitor HDD activity and track the disk temperature, thus helping you prevent damage and data loss.
Simplistic and novice-accessible UI
You may find the program a bit difficult to use when you first load it, but it's only because it sports a lot of features, showing valuable information basically anywhere you look. Drives and partition are listed on the left side, along with health, temperature and free space, so it's easy to pick one and find more information about it.
On the other hand, the rest of the features are organized in tabs, together with detailed explanations to assist you all the time. The ‘Overview' tab shows brief information on performance and health, but also power on time and estimated remaining lifetime. Conducting a Surface Test will show even more information and help you fix potential problems.
A highly configurable application that allows you to monitor the state of your hard disk
The ‘Temperature' section displays the current values for the selected drive, as well as the day's average and maximum temperature. Plus, it shows three different graphs with the current, the daily average and the daily maximum temperature. Disk performance is the section that could prove most handy as it shows details such as total data read and write, current, average and maximum transfer rate, but also the estimated maximum transfer rate and the average disk activity.
Hard Disk Sentinel has a comprehensive settings menu to configure hotkeys, disk control, message settings, alerts and even the way the hard disk temperature icon will look in the System Tray. There are multiple tests available, including Random Seek Test and Surface Test and it's better to close all the other applications before going in there to get the most accurate results possible.
Keep a close eye on your computer's hard disks with the help of this useful utility
All in all, Hard Disk Sentinel is definitely worth a try if you're afraid that something is wrong with your hard drives.
Hard Disk Sentinel Professional
Keeping your hard disk healthy should be your top priority when it comes to your computer. Potential problems, degradations and even failures can lead to losing the entire data on the disk. Hard Disk Sentinel Professional is a tool that can help monitor your HDD.
Simple to use and very capable utility for monitoring the state of your computer's hard disk
The software comes with a nice interface and with an intuitive layout. Considering the complex and advanced functions of this app, the simple UI helps you to better understand what the software has to offer. From the main window, you can also see a complex list of data about your disk drive, such as the serial number, interface, model ID, firmware revision, number of sectors and many other details. Also, you can check real-time information regarding the transfer rate.
Hard Disk Sentinel Professional can monitor various things about your disks, such as temperature and S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) attributes. You can also perform tests with this program. For example, you can perform a surface test to verify the sectors’ accessibility and readability. This can be done in five different ways. Some are non-destructive, only checking the disk’s performance, while other methods involve refreshing the data area of the storage device or even erasing all information.
Make use of the available tests and notification settings to gain a clear understanding regarding the state of your hard disk
Various test preferences, such as sector order, can be adjusted to suit your needs. Also, you can customize your alerts. Thus, you can set the app to let you know when failures are expected, when the disk’s health is low, when temperatures are too high, when new log entries are added and when free disk space is low.
For any of these, you can play a sound, send or display a message, create a panic back-up or shut down your system.
Manages to be both user-friendly and powerful
All in all, Hard Disk Sentinel Professional is an advanced utility that can give you valuable information about the state of your drives. Some previous experience with this type of software is required, mainly because of the advanced functions it offers.
