Do you want to know when your harddisk dies ?

Now under normal circumstances, MG would never advertise for a commercial product unless it has some greater importance to the community. Which is why MG wants to give HD Sentinel some awareness.

HD Sentinel is one of those harddisk programs which can tell you some information about your harddrives, and it even manages to monitor certain areas in regard to your harddrives and provide you with information about the S.M.A.R.T. state of your drives.

All this seem very nice, but unless you can actually see what you can do, you get little impression of how it could help you. So look at the partial screenshots below and judge for yourself wether or not HD Sentinel may be a tool for you.

After you have installed HD Sentinel, then your icons in Explorer changes slightly. You can see a bit more about capacity and status.

Explorer tree view

Explorer window view

You also get some additional information in your system tray. And although it doesn't look as sleek as DTemp then it does show you some extra information about the common health of the harddrive.

Temperature and Health status

If you start the main program you get a huge chunk of additional information available. There are 7 tabs per drive where as the overview gives you infor about the number of days the harddrive has been running and the number of remaining days it has to live in before it dies, IF the current rate of degradation continues. The information is gather mainly from your harddrives S.M.A.R.T. tables.

Overview shows possible lifespan of your harddisk

If you click the S.M.A.R.T. tab then you get the nitty gritty information. There you can find information about the real drive status, how many time it has been powered on and failed. How many times it has tried to re-allocate a bad sector and failed/succeded. This may be new information to you, but present harddrives has some extra space sectors where bad sectors gets re-allocated to when it finds a bad sector. And if you run out of spare sectors then your drive is in real bad shape. If the drive has too many errors then performance begins to suffer and so on. If you want to know the detailed meaning of all the S.M.A.R.T. attributes and how to read them then look here: Wikipedia - S.M.A.R.T.

Detailed information on harddrive

Switching to the 2nd last tab gives you some performance information which are update live. So you can let the windows stay open and then begin reading and writing to/from the drive to see how good performance is and you can even try the performance between your drives/controllers.

Performance in real-time

And HD Sentinal handles RAID volumes also, and SCSI and all that jazz.