Listen to Your HDD's Heartbeat

fair
key review info
application features
  • Monitor hard drives health, performance and temperature
  • (5 more, see all...)

Hard Disk industry passes through a major transition. The boom in what concerns the size has already started. Prices are going down while larger and larger disks appear on the market. With all the disk space, I guess we should pay more attention to the storage devices installed on our machine. Utilities like disk checkers, temperature, performance and health monitors are becoming more appealing these days.

The Internet provides lots of utilities able to give us the condition of the disk in order to avoid a hardware aftermath. The general purpose is reading S.M.A.R.T. Information on the hard disk and serve it on a platter. If you know how to interpret the data you'll get a pretty good idea on the lifespan of the disk.

But there are less difficult applications that come at lower prices for the average user. HDD Observer priced at $24.95 and is a fairly new entry on the market. The application is designed to show you the status of your disks and do a little optimization here and there. The 30 days trial period lets you fully test the program at full capacity with absolutely no restriction.

Installing the software may take a while as it has to install the redistributable version of Microsoft C. But immediately after completion two little icons will find their place in the system tray. One of them will indicate disk activity and the other temperature, health and performance values. The interface offers more options, designed to optimize the disks on your computer.

All the menus run down on the left hand side while in the right there are the settings and options. The first menu on the list, General Status, displays details about the detected hard disks. In my case there are two (USB flash and fixed disk) and only one has S.M.A.R.T. capabilities so all the values are for the fixed disk. The general details show the maximum temperature detected, minimum health and performance. In addition to this, there are the warning values for all three monitors. In the lower right hand corner there is the overall status of the monitored disk(s).

The menu offers a comprehensive look for each disk there is installed on the computer. The details presented include performance, health and temperature status as well as total worktime, file system used, file fragmentation level for each partition and amount of free space.

Configuring HDD Observer is piece of cake as it is just a matter of enabling or disabling the available options. You can choose what information to be displayed (HDD activity in system tray, health, free space, file fragmentation, performance and temperature alerts) as well as set the thresholds for critical performance, health, temperature (Celsius degrees), free space, junk files and file fragmentation.

The alerts take the form of a balloon popping up from system tray and displaying the type of critical stage of the drive. It will not go away unless attended. Audio alert is present as well, but you won't be able to hear it during a gaming session with the volume pumped up in the headphones. Apart from this, the visual notification will not appear on top of all the other windows.

HDD Observer comes with a toolbox of instruments meant to tweak the hard disk and the computer for a better response. Thus you benefit from a disk cleaner, defragmenter, registry cleaner and defragmenter. All is well up to now as none of the tools works properly. Disk cleaner for instance could not pick up all the junk I created specially for testing its detection skills.

When using Disk Cleaner utility for instance, all the empty documents and invalid shortcuts were overlooked by the application during the sweep. The progress was slow and it seems that only certain file types are picked up. Scanning system partition revealed a bunch of invalid data which was indeed useless and the application was successful in removing it.

Scan options are limited to invalid shortcuts, Start menu entries and Program Files directories, empty files and temporaries. My Program Files contained two invalid directories which were not removed after HDD Observer showed that all the items were removed. Details window contains all the detected items and hovering the mouse over them will give the exact location on disk.

Defragmentation is also time consuming. The good part is that the application can defragment multiple drives at once, but be prepared for a long wait. Regarding the effects, the program does not the best of the job but it is better than many defragmenters I've seen. Nothing extraordinary but it works pretty good. Drive map legend can be accessed by simply clicking on the graphic.

Registry Cleaner in HDD Observer is definitely among the worst I have seen. I did five tests in order to make sure that there is nothing wrong with it. After the first scan it revealed a total amount of 607 invalid entries (quite a lot considering that my registry cleaning arsenal is composed of six different tools I run every other day). After cleaning completed, it reiterated the process with the same result: 607 invalid items. Third time's a charm, right? Right! Cleaned again and the third time there was some improvement as only 214 items were detected. Repeated the operation and everything was going for the better with only 206 invalids. But here came the fifth round of cleaning and scanning and the result was 209 invalid registry entries. Well, at least it was fun doing all the testing.

Mind that Registry Cleaner took into sight only ActiveX, DLL and COM objects, Add/Remove Programs, file types and extensions, shared files and assemblies, applications and invalid paths, font files and help files areas of the registry.

The Good

HDD Observer is very easy to use and poses absolutely no problem in handling it. The interface is very well structured and bringing all the tools for disk optimization is definitely a good idea.

The user has disk activity information at hand.

The Bad

Some built-in instruments are not working properly. There is little configuration to be made as you cannot set the update period for the values, set a delay period before alert is activated.

There is a lot of work to be done from here on to make the application flawless and functional.

The Truth

These being said, you have 30 days to test the application and judge the results by yourself. There is little configuration and to be frank only the performance, temperature, performance and disk activity are worthy of attention.

I guess the release date (August 13, 2007) has something to do with the performance of the software.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 4
features 3
ease of use 5
pricing / value 2


final rating 2
Editor's review
fair
 
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