Monitor Hard Drive Or SSD Health & Performance With HDDExpert
Manufacturers are always pushing boundaries trying to make hard disks as robust and reliable as possible. Despite that, HDD failure and data loss remains an inescapable reality. Therefore, there are RAID configurations, backup systems and other solutions designed to prevent data loss and minimize the impact to an organization when drives simply stop working. While there are various ways to help you prevent data loss, one of the easiest methods is to keep a check on your hard drive’s health using monitoring tools. One such utility goes by the name HDDExpert. It is a free Windows application by KC Software that displays health & performance of your HDD or SSD, decodes S.M.A.R.T. attributes into readable form and recommends ways to maintain the health of your drives.
The program doesn’t confuse you with excessive technical jargon, unlike most similar tools. It’s simple interface makes it an easy tool to use even for novice users. It doesn’t confuse you with .
Once launched, HDDExpert scans through all drives and partitions in your system. It then displays manufacturer name, model, firmware, serial number, temperature reading and cache size of the disk(s). The app also displays warning messages for temperature and health, and lets you know whether a backup or spare HDD is needed or not.
The lower part of its interface carries information related to damage or errors at different sectors on the disk. In addition, the app displays total power cycle count and total operation time.
Right beside these readings, you’ll find three buttons labeled ‘Fans’, ‘Spare’ and ‘Backup’. The first two take you to an Amazon search page, which contains recommended products such as cooling fans and HDD replacement parts. The Backup button links to ‘Backup & Recovery 12 Home’, a paid program that you can install and use to create backups of the data on your disks. In the ‘Message’ section beside these buttons, the tool displays its verdict on the state of your drives and recommendations to prevent (Spare) or prepare (Backup) for failures.
All in all, a simple disk health monitoring software that could save your precious data before it’s too late. The tool can come in handy to test old drives as soon as they start posing problems, so you may get a replacement before complete failure of the disk and the loss of all the data on it.
HDDExpert works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.
This doesn’t work correctly. It reports two of my drives as having a ridiculous number of errors, so many so that the drive could not possibly be functioning. Meanwhile, SeaTools reports no problems with the same drives and they have exhibited no problems.
Conclusion: HDDExpert is buggy.