Hard Drive Monitor

Hard Drive Monitor is a tiny and portable software program that gives you the possibility to keep an eye on your hard drives when it comes to their temperature.

It compiles a detailed report with S.M.A.R.T. information and shows a temp indicator in the system tray, thus letting you identify possible drive failures.

Before proceeding any further, you should know that the app hasn't been updated for a pretty long time, and it doesn't work properly on later Windows versions.

Since installation is not needed, you can drop the executable file anywhere on the disk and just click it to launch Hard Drive Monitor.

Otherwise, you can save it to a pen drive or other removable storage device to directly run it on any machine effortlessly. Unlike most installers, it doesn't modify Windows registry settings.

As far as the interface is concerned, Hard Drive Monitor adopts a small window with a well-structured layout, where you can select a hard drive and get an immediate reading of its temperature in the taskbar notifications area as well as in the main window.

HDD details reveal the model and serial numbers, firmware revision, along with the number of heads, cylinders and sectors per track.

You can enable S.M.A.R.T. mode to find out the current, worst and threshold value of each drive, including the read error rate, throughput performance, spin-up time, start and stop count, seek error rate, and device power cycle count.

Information can be refreshed with the click of a button. Unfortunately, Hard Drive Monitor doesn't integrate options for exporting it to file or copying it to the Clipboard.

The tool didn't put a strain on the overall performance of the PC in our tests, thanks to the fact that it needed low CPU and RAM to work properly. It had a good response time and didn't hang, crash or display errors.

Too bad that it hasn't been updated for a long time. However, you can still run it on older Windows to monitor the status of your hard drives.