Is Your HDD In Need For A Physical?

excellent
key review info
application features
  • Usability
  • (10 more, see all...)

The moment you buy a new hard disk, you know for sure that sooner or later it is going to bail on you and lose a lot of data, much of which you consider extremely important. The thought may not occur in that exact moment, but you know it. And what do you do to prevent the disaster and avoid losing all those files? Most users simply wait for the inevitable to happen and do absolutely nothing. The good thing is that HDDs, depending on the way they are treated, have quite a lifespan.

All this despite the fact that the market is flooded with software specially designed to check on the health integrity of your hard disk. You have freeware solutions to choose from, although these are not always accurate enough to rely on or do not incorporate all the functions you need. Paid versions of HDD health checking applications are most of the times the final solution to your problems as they come complete with all the features necessary for a good monitoring and user alerting in case something exceeds a certain threshold.

HDDLife pro is one of the applications on the market that comes both in paid version as well as a freebie and there is also a version for notebooks, with special capabilities. The price of the software dropped to only $25 and you benefit from the full professional version in the first 15 days. After that time, all limitations of the freeware version will enter into force and the application will be crippled of some really nice features (check out the last picture at the end of the review for a version comparison chart).

HDDLife Pro's interface is formed of different sections covering information on the total capacity of the monitored disk, temperature, total work-time, health status, performance level as well as the capacity of each drive available and the free space left. Additional options permit the user the access of different features that may be supported by the monitored hardware component like automatic acoustic management, or advanced power management, which can influence the noise made by the disk or power usage.

S.M.A.R.T. attributes are no longer a luxury reserved only for more expensive disks and this feature is included in all hard disks available on the market. HDDLife can read the attributes and present them to the user in an undeformed manner, providing a brief explanation for each of them. This way, you don't get to stare at a bunch of values and limits without knowing if those limits are for maximum or minimum.

Depending on how endowed is your hard disk, HDDLife can read attributes for Raw Read Error, Spin Up Time, Start/Stop Count, Reallocated Sectors Count, Seek Error Rate, Power-On Hours, Spin Retry Count, Calibration Retry Count, Temperature, Ultra DMA CRC Error Count, Multi Zone Error Rate, etc. You are also given the threshold as well as current value and the worst one recorded. The last column in the table shows you the status of the disk.

The application is perfectly capable of monitoring the health of the disk and alerts you when a specific limit is reached. It will stay in system tray and show you from there the temperature of the storage device and the disk usage (read/write activity).

Configuring the application is nothing complicated and all options are intelligible even by the non-experienced user, while the more experienced one will have absolutely no problem with making the proper settings. HDDLife can be set to start with Windows for monitoring the disk right from the moment of usage and life status can be checked at a user specific time frequency.

Displaying the temperature can be made in both Celsius and Fahrenheit, depending on how comfortable you feel with either of them. Setting urgent and critical temperatures is also possible and the moment these are reached, the software will start a nuclear alarm-like sound and pop up a balloon letting you know on the heat wave endangering your disk. It may seem a bit extravagant, but I really liked it; you can substitute it with whatever WAV file you consider suitable for such an alert.

The application will alert you whenever the urgent and critical limits of disk space are reached (sure you get to set these as well). The default thresholds are set to 10% of the total capacity for urgent attention and 5% of the total storage capacity for critical level. More than this, you get to establish the frequency for checking on the space left.

A special section in Preferences dialog is allocated to the system tray icon display. There are four alternatives available and the only difference is that each one of them comes with its own look; other than this, the information available at hovering the mouse over them is exactly the same: serial number, storage capacity, health, performance and temperature.

Very important to mention is the fact that HDDLife can send warnings to a user defined email address whenever something goes wrong. Remedying the problem is done by turning off computer activity using one of the following methods: hibernation, stand by or power off. With these two functions you can leave your computer turned on at home and get email notifications to alert you of the situation and enforce automatic measures for fixing the problem (or reducing the damage).

Warning bindings is the best way to cleanly and effortlessly set the alerts HDDLife should use depending on the situation to be handled. Setting up the desired types of alerts and the means of notifying you consists in crossing the alert type with the corresponding warning.

Keeping your eyes on the health of your disks is fairly easy, as the software let's you save a report file containing statistics on S.M.A.R.T. attributes and performance or temperature or firmware version. Unfortunately, not all the data is neatly organized and S.M.A.R.T. attributes, for instance, cannot be interpreted quite by any user.

HDDLife Pro makes for a very good hard disk monitoring application providing all the details you need in order to predict and take the necessary precautions in case of hard disk failure. It is flexible enough to permit remote notification in case something goes wrong and interrupt the activity of the computer using one method or another.

The Good

HDDLife makes for a very good S.M.A.R.T. attributes monitoring tool, comprehensible, with easy to access options and offering pervasive information on the activity of your disk(s).

It can alert you to a remote location via email sending and it can also take user defined actions whenever a threshold is exceeded.

The Bad

Taking into account the myriad of applications that can be used roughly for the same purposes, HDDLife comes at a steep price.

The TXT generated report is not too easy to handle as it does not include the S.M.A.R.T. attributes' names, only their values.

The Truth

All in all, the application does a great job. It alerts the user of any strain inflicted on the hardware and provides pervasive information on multiple factors related to hard disks' health.

The user interface is apprehensible and easy to manipulate by almost all types of users with absolutely no problems. Thresholds are imposed by the user, as well as the actions to be taken when the limit is reached.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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


final rating 5
Editor's review
excellent
 
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