14 DAY TRIAL // I always said that hard disks have to be protected at all times from any sort of deterioration that may occur. It may not be possible all the time, but at least there are softwares capable of estimating the time it has left, meaning the TEC (Threshold Exceed Condition). When the limits are exceeded you should ask yourself some questions and update your backups as soon as possible.
Not too many users employ hard disk utility softwares that estimate the life of your hard drives, although some of these softwares are free and more than easy to use. You should realize that not all similar applications are Active Smart and the $ difference has also got a word or two.
PassMark Software offers a free disk utility that will give you details about your hard drive behavior and health. DiskCheckup is free for personal use and everybody can use it. For a copy of the company license the users should make a request on the software's homepage.
I have to mention that the program will not harm your hard disk(s) in any way, as it merely takes the data from the SMART attributes (if the disk supports it, as every disk model available in stores now is definitely equipped with this technology).
DiskCheckup will first and foremost offer the details about your storage device(s) and the SMART info. In fact, this is how the interface is divided: two tabs giving information about the device (Device Info) and its behavior (SMART Info).
Thus, the user will learn about the capacity (as if it were secret information), serial number, model number, firmware revision, number of partitions and their capacity, IDE registers, ID sector (number of cylinders, heads, sectors per track, buffer size etc.).
The second tab is the most important one as it offers lots of details about the storage device's activity. The information included in here will show the current temperature of the hard disk, the spin up time, the power cycle count or the write error count. For those of you that are not familiar with the terms, the Help menu will prove to be a good reference.
The Configuration menu allows the users to set the application to display alerts when something goes wrong (temperature too high, a threshold has been exceeded etc.). The notifications can be received in two ways: either by choosing to display a notification window or by sending it over the Internet, via e-mail to a user specified address. Here, you can also set the warning level for the temperature (the default value is 60 degrees Celsius) and the temperature unit (Celsius or Fahrenheit).
The refresh rate of reading the SMART attribute can also be adjusted from the default ten minutes to whatever value you want, as it seems that you can set a maximum of 999999999 minutes. The minimum value cannot go under one minute. Checking the "Record SMART attributes for TEC computation" should make the application display a chart of the TEC prediction. However, in my case this option did not work, although I have followed all the steps described in the Help menu.
The Good
The application is free for personal use, so everybody can use it at home. The simple interface combined with the up to date information in the Help menu will provide the inexperienced user with the necessary basic knowledge about hard disks.
The software does not harm your computer; it just reads the data from the SMART attributes. The SMART Info tab displays the status, raw value, current and worst value as well as the threshold for all the SMART attributes displayed.
The Bad
I wish I could see the TEC chart. I found the binary file in the installation directory, but the only trouble was that there are no directions as to how to open it. Also, in the SMART Info window all the Predicted TEC Date displayed N.A., so I was not able to find out an estimation of my hard disk failure date.
Minimizing to tray is not supported, so the user will have to keep the window open in the taskbar (taking space); the notification window did not work. However, the temperature row turns red if the set temperature is exceeded.
The Truth
DiskChekup proves to be a good hard disk monitoring application, but fails to notify the user about dangerous changes that take place inside your hard disk.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
