ActiveSMART

Active SMART is a feature-rich application suite with tools for keeping track of your hard drive's health status, in order to detect and prevent any issues that may cause unexpected data loss.

The interface is represented by a standard window with multiple tabs, each addressing a critical area of the HDD. To get started you can look into an overview on disk health, performance, temperature and total free space, together with disk monitoring statistics and drive temperature history.

When it comes to disk information, Active SMART shows the drive model name, serial number, firmware, capacity and type, along with in-depth drive details focusing on local volumes, logical sectors, transfer mode, device info (e.g. removable media feature set support), power supply, and security (e.g. enhanced security erase support).

Active SMART also monitors S.M.A.R.T attributes and shows the T.E.C. data, value, threshold and worst values, and status. These include end-to-end error, head flying hours, total read and written LBA, command timeout, and airflow temperature.

Another module of the app suite enables you to submit a disk or folder for analysis, in order to get a graphical representation with the files occupying the most space on disk (a legend is available).

You can run a benchmark on disk temperature by picking a date range, in order to evaluate a history chart. Last but not least, Active SMART comprises a file shredding tool for permanently eliminating data, and records important hard drive events to a log section, while giving you the possibility of saving them to file (CSV format) for further scrutiny.

The utility set requires a moderate-to-high amount of CPU and RAM, has a good response time, and may take a while to finish a disk space analysis or temperature test. However, we haven't come across any issues, since it did not hang, crash or pop up error dialogs. Overall, Active SMART integrates powerful disk evaluation features to satisfy all power users.