![]() However, there are a few points on which I have had a different experience. ![]() Generally, this is a great article about SMART data and mechanical hard drives. The standard version for 1 PC costs $20US, so the family pack is a really good value IMO. On the overview tab for each drive, it estimates remaining lifetime, with the standard being “more than 1000 days” and shows Performance and Health as a percentage – starting at 100%, Power on time in days and hours, total start/stop count. I replaced it before it failed because of the warning, and had zero data loss. After 10 years HD Sentinel warned me when it started getting wobbly. One drive was a large capacity drive (for the time), and so I continued to use it. I was a beta tester years ago for a major brand hard drive manufacturer. The default configuration is pretty good. It has far too many customizations to list, and a huge amount of info on the Information tab for each drive.įor non-tech users, it summarizes each drive as a percentage of health. You can configure audio alarms also and even set Panic Backup and Shut Down for each temp threshold. You can set custom thresholds for each drive for temperature (NVMe slots on the motherboard have different temp ranges from spinner drives, for example) – 3 different thresholds – below x is normal, x1-x2 is yellow, and above x3 is red. In my custom built desktop, I have 1 NVMe drive and 6 spinner drives. The status icon is color coded, and provides the temperature of each drive (F or C). For each internal hard drive, it provides a status icon in the system tray and an activity icon (once turned on). I’ve never noticed a performance hit using this software. I have the Family pack (5 PCs Lifetime) of HD Sentinel Pro and it is installed on every one of them. As a 30+ year IT tech, I have a number of desktops and laptops in my household. ![]() I have used Hard Disk Sentinel Pro for over a decade. Please see the attached screen capture which shows Speccy’s detected SMART parameters for a Seagate 2TB external hard drive which was attached to my computer via a USB port.Īwesome article on a neglected topic. It all depends on the capabilities of the hard drive’s USB interface. Interestingly, Piriform’s Speccy program can correctly and fully report a USB attached hard drive’s SMART data for many types of external hard drives which are attached via USB. Since the drive’s Ultra DMA CRC Error Count did not increase after replacing the SATA data cable, I considered the hard drive to still be totally good to use since the issue was with the original SATA data cable and not with the hard drive itself. After replacing the drive’s SATA data cable, I checked the hard drive’s SMART diagnostics in order to see if the drive’s UltraDMA CRC Error Count is no longer increasing. I have also had the former occur as well, due to not using latching SATA data cables for the affected hard drive. The sudden loss of all system restore points is too much to explain here. The result was occasionally obvious system sluggishness and the sudden loss of all system restore points after rebooting the computer. This parameter can suddenly become quite high due to either flaky SATA cable connections, or due to failing onboard I/O controller circuitry on the hard drive’s motherboard. This could be caused by the disk drive’s temperature being too warm, or can also be caused in newer helium-filled hard drives in which the drive seals have allowed some helium to escape and also allowed some nitrogen and oxygen from the external atmosphere to seep in.Īnother thing which I like to periodically check in SMART is the UltraDMA CRC Error Count. I am not keen on letting any hard drive’s temperature get above 50° Celsius while the hard drive is being defragmented since there is the likelihood for SMART to record High Fly Writes (the drive’s heads are flying too high over the disk surface). Furthermore, I don’t trust any new hard drive until its Power-On Hours and Head Flying Hours exceeds 30 days (approx 700 hours) since hard drives have a tendency to fail within the first 30 days or to begin to fail after four years. I also replace hard drives if the Reported Uncorrectable Errors is not zero or if the Head Flying Hours gets to be over four years (approx 8800 hours). I too replace hard drives if any of the sector counts is not zero.
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