Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS HDD/SSD monitoring and analysis application. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair disk drive problems, report and display SSD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the hard disks and solid state disks inside the computer or in external enclosures (USB / e-SATA). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data. The software monitors hard disk drive / HDD status, including health, temperature and all S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, built in most hard disks and solid state disks today) values for each disks. Also it measures the disk transfer speed in real time which can be used as a benchmark or to detect possible hard disk failures, performance degradations.

HDSentinel is the perfect data protection solution: it can be effectively used to prevent HDD failure and SSD / HDD data loss because it has the most sensitive disk health rating system which is extremely sensitive to disk problems. This way even a small HDD problem can’t be missed. The Professional version has scheduled and automatic (on-problem) disk backup options to prevent data loss caused by not only failure but by malware or accidental delete also.

HDD Sentinel runs in the background and verifies SSD / HDD health status by inspecting the SMART status of the disk(s). If an error is found or unexpected behaviour is detected, it warns the user about the current situation and also can perform appropriate actions (for example, start an automatic backup).

Usually, hard disk health status may slowly decline, from day to day. The SMART monitoring technology can predict HDD failure by examining the critical values of the disk drive. Compared to other software, Hard Disk Sentinel detects and reports every disk problem. It is much more sensitive to disk failures and can display better and more detailed information about hard disk expected life and the problems found (if any). This is a more sophisticated way to predict failures than the “traditional” method: checking S.M.A.R.T. attribute thresholds and values only. For more information, please read how S.M.A.R.T. works and why Hard Disk Sentinel is different.

The software displays the current hard disk temperature and logs maximum and average HDD temperatures. This may be used to check the maximum temperature under high hard disk load.

Changes in Hard Disk Sentinel 4.00 (1/2/2012):

Improvements and new features:
* Portable version: runs without installation and without modification of local system
* Disk menu -> Online Warranty Check: verify drive warranty status on manufacturer website
* Configuration -> Advanced options: option to change data folder location
* option to enter comment (tag) for each hard disks
* option to copy single line to clipboard from “Information” page after right-click popup menu
* hard disk surface test improvements
* option to export transfer rate values after surface test
* last detection timestamp displayed on the bottom status line
* added /TXTREPORT [filename], /HTMLREPORT [filename] command line parameters to quickly save complete report
* Reset workload counters function for Intel SSD
* displaying lifetime reads / writes for specific hard disks with support (Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba)
* option to automatically re-adjust advanced power management / acoustic management settings on startup if required
* added Belarusian language support (translated by Yuri Petrashko)
* added digital signatures to files

Improved hardware support:
* added support for DELL RAID controllers
* added support for HP USB external drives
* added support for Marvell 63xx/64xx SAS RAID controllers (detection of SAS hard disk drives in RAID array)
* improved support and attribute list for Sandforce SSD, Samsung SSD, Intel SSD models
* improved support for Crucial SSD, Kingston SSD
* improved support for USB hard disk drives and USB adapters
* improved compatibility for Marvell SATA controllers
* improved SCSI/SAS hard disk drive support: advanced health calculation, power on time display, test log
* improved detection of hard disk power state
* improved short / extended self test starting on Windows 7
* improved advanced power management / acoustic management configuration
* improved support for RAID 10 arrays on LSI controllers
* improved RAID support under Windows 2003 x64
* improved functionality after waking up from standby with some USB hard disk drives
* detecting drives A: and B: if they are associated with hard disks / SSDs
Bug fixes, further modifications:
* using local APPDATA folder for Windows scheduler configuration files (.VBS files) under Windows Vista, 7, 2008, 8
* improved real-time performance detection
* bug fixed with tray icons under Windows 7 x64
* bug fixed with “registry-export” projects
* online attribute comparison and tray icon problems fixed with Samsung 2.5″ SSDs

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