When my decade-old desktop began making noises, one likely cause may have been a failing hard drive, any one of which might be the source, even though none were as old as the computer itself. The main drive in this machine, a 1TB Samsung SSD, was unlikely to be the cause, as it has no moving parts. Also, using the Samsung Magician utility to check other drives would be of no use, because Samsung Magician (supplied by Samsung) checks only for Samsung drives.

[I tried a free program, HDDScan, before hearing about Hard Disk Sentinel, as recommended by a club member. Both appear to perform similar functions, including temperature monitoring, yet I'm not sure if the Trial version of Hard Disk Sentinel offers a full gamut of tools, compared to the Pro version.]

HDDScan checks RAID, Flash, SSD, and spinning hard drives (IDE and SATA), for bad sectors / blocks, and will show SMART attributes for each drive. For spinning drives it can control spin-up/down, speed, noise and wakeups - also does destructive erasures.

HDDScan's website offers full descriptions of all features, using screen shots - some are shown here. HDDScan aids the writing of command line batch files, so that the program can run on start-up, and it can print most test screen results, or save them as web files.

Figure 1: Shows results for a spinning drive. It looks healthy.

Figure 2: Yes, eight drives are attached to this computer. Click on the one needing to be tested.

Figure 4: Read Data to the Host yields block results (in a pattern similar to de-fragging).

Figure 5: Block Processing results when processing time for each is 51 milliseconds.

Figure 6: Further controls are available for some spinning drives.

System requirements:

Platform: Windows XP SP3 and above

Version: 4.1

Languages: English

Download Size: 3.74 MB

Installed Size: 6.97 MB

Licence: FREE

Rating:

Download Site here.