HDD Guardian tests and monitors your hard drive healthSMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting...

1. HDD Guardian tests and monitors your hard drive health
HDD Guardian tests and monitors your hard drive health
SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a monitoring system which reports
on various reliability indicators, and sometimes highlights imminent hardware failure of HDDs and
SSDs.
These predictions can sometimes be questionable, but SMART still has plenty to offer, and the open
source HDD Guardian (also available in a portable edition) provides a simple and straightforward
way to find out more.
Launch the program and its Overview tab displays a basic system summary: your hard drives, their
temperature, reliability score, bad
http://quacksadness5717.blogs.experienceproject.com/3733942.html sectors and ATA errors,
amongst others.
The Manage tab expands on this, in particular with a "S.M.A.R.T. attributes" section which lists all
the drive's raw data. These are the details you've seen in other SMART software: spin-up time, error
rates, retry counts, power on times, and so on. You probably won't know what most of the figures
mean -- we don't, either -- but just spotting high values, or being able to compare error rates
between drives, can provide useful information.
HDD Guardian doesn't just passively read a few numbers, though -- it also provides access to many
more advanced SMART and system features. You're able to run various device self-tests, set a
spindown timer, adjust the drive Advanced Power Management setting, enable/ disable write
caching and read look-ahead, even turn SMART off entirely if you can think of a reason to do so. The
system tweaks are for experts only, and we'd leave them alone unless you're very sure you know
what you're doing, but the self-tests are a handy way to collect more data on a drive.
We would probably run HDD Guardian to query drives on demand, when we suspected a problem,

2. but the program also supports real-time monitoring. Run it in the background and you can be
warned of any drive issues as they happen via an icon in your system tray, or even via an email.
HDD Guardian's (also available in a portable edition) other highlight is an excellent Settings dialog
with an amazing range of features. One thoughtful example: enable "Power mode" and you can tell
the program not to check a device if it's in sleep or standby mode, so it won't spin up unnecessarily.
That's a nice touch, and the program has plenty more.