There are many ways and software tools to recover data lost due to a disk malfunction or failure, but there is only one way not to get that far – monitor your hard disks to detect any potential damage well before it happens. Hard Disk Sentinel Pro is a tool designed for IT professionals and knowledgeable users alike who want to keep an eye on their external and internal drives’ behavior and performance and thus foresee any potential malfunction ahead of time.
Hard Disk Sentinel Pro is useful on many levels. As an “information tool”, its tabbed main interface provides you with at-a-glance information on your disks’ performance, health, estimated remaining lifetime, temperature, specific product data, a list with all the S.M.A.R.T. values, numerical and graphical information about your disks’ activity and transfer rates, etc.
As a “warning tool”, the program offers IT managers a large combination of technical data and graphical information on your disks’ health and overall status for you to interpret and analyze. Users with a different background will benefit from the program’s exhaustive range of graphs and alert messages, which will let them know immediately if anything is not going as it should.
As a “disk testing tool”, Hard Disk Sentinel Pro counts with a long list of self-tests to check certain hardware components, such as the heads, the servo, the internal buffer, etc.; to verify the entire disk’s surface, bad-sector re-allocation included; to verify the disk noise, the temperature, and the seek time performance, and even to perform an intensive stress-test. Additionally, to all these tests, the program also offers solutions to fix certain hard disk problems, usually those related to potential surface damages.
Finally, as a “data loss prevention” tool, this high-end utility provides you with full backup functionality with various automatic backup options, including backing up data from remote computers in a network. Besides, it comes with a useful shutdown feature that will turn off your computer automatically in case of disk failure, disk overheat, or any hint of disk health degradation.
The list of features does not end here – this is but a summary of Hard Disk Sentinel Pro’s main functionality. The rest is for you to discover. Except for a few remote disk management functions, this Professional version of the program mirrors the superior Enterprise edition. Other less demanding users may want to opt for the Standard edition, which includes the program’s basic functionality. In any case, I cannot recommend highly enough to anyone interested in HDD monitoring to download and install the Trial edition and see the wealth of features and functions that the program offers for themselves.
v5.2 [Mar 28, 2018]
- added option to monitor NAS boxes, hard disks used with Network Attached Storage devices.
- added Configuration -> Advanced Options -> Monitor Windows Event Log for problems related to disks and storage subsystem. By this option, Hard Disk Sentinel Pro detects if Windows saves errors/warnings to SYSTEM event log and report recent problems detected while Hard Disk Sentinel is running/monitoring and use them in calculation of health to show issues, degradations (registered Pro version).
- display if Configuration -> Disk Control -> Disable detection of USB and SCSI drives checked and blocking detection.
- added SSD features (Read Zeroes After Trim) and security features (Sanitize, Overwrite, Crypto scramble, Block erase etc.) to Information page and reports.
- detection and reporting new ATA standards and new ATA / Serial ATA features on Information page: Device sleep (DevSleep), Service interrupt, Device encrypts all data, IDLE IMMEDIATE, Nominal form factor, NCQ Streaming and autosense, Rebuild assist, Hybrid information.
- display TRIM status in addition to complete health / temperature / status for NVMe / M.2 SSDs.
- displaying custom configured temperature thresholds on Temperature page.
- displaying lifetime writes of hard disks on main overview page (if supported, for example new Seagate and WD Black drives).
- improved WRITE testing (Surface test -> Write test, Write+Read, Reinitialise disk surface) to prevent "access denied" error.
- updated Help to cover new functions, features.
- completely redesigned tray icon handling: better sort/move/order tray icons under Windows 7, 8.1, 10.
- improved disk surface test performance with Intel, LSI, Dell SAS RAID controllers and SAS HBAs.
- improved disk surface test performance with hard disks formatted with 520 / 528 bytes/sector.
- improved text description on various errors/problems.
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