[Freeware] Monitor Health Of Your Hard Disk with HDD Health
We save all kinds of data on our hard disks and depend on them heavily for all our local data storage needs. Therefore, it becomes very important for us, the users, to ensure that the disk always keeps working. In order to help you with maintaining the disk and alerting you of any errors, HDD Health is the software you must check.
HDD Health is a full-featured failure-prediction agent for machines using Windows 95, 98, NT, Me, 2000 and XP. 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.
How does HDD Health Work?
HDD Health uses S.M.A.R.T. technology, included in all modern hard disks. S.M.A.R.T. is an HDD self-testing and monitoring technology. 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 – 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 some critical attributes to check the hard drive health. You can see drive health status in percents in the main window of HDD Health.
You can even setup HDD Health to alert you in case of critical drive health. 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.
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[...] [Freeware] Monitor Health Of Your Hard Disk with HDD Health Posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 in Free – Comments: (0) We save all kinds of data on our hard disks and depend on them heavily for all our local data storage needs. Therefore, it becomes very important for us, the users, to ensure that the disk always keeps working. In order to help you with maintaining the disk and alerting you of any errors, HDD Health is the software you must check. [...]