Is your SSD in a good shape? Get Notified before problems strikes with HD Sentinel

HD Sentinel is a multi OS monitoring and testing utility – Windows, Linux or DOS – for SSDs and HDDs. It's a tool which monitors and detect problems, and if there are some problems, it has a capability to launch a repair actions or trigger an external backup software to start backing up a faulty drive before a complete crash. 

It can check internal, external drives, and also drives installed in RAID groups.  HDD Sentinel report and display SSD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. There is also Pro and Server version, in addition to the free version which provides limited functionality, but the product installs as a 30 days trial.

Features:

• Capable monitoring of multiple disks (IDE / Serial ATA (S-ATA, e-SATA) / SCSI / SAS / USB hard disks) or in an external enclosure.
• Provides several tests which can detect degradations in all SMART parameters and issues.
• Alerting capabilities through E-mail, SMS, network message, play sounds, trigger external application for imediate backup.
• Able to shutdown computer in case there is an overheat or HDD/SSD problem
• Performance – read/write real time performance tab.
• Partition informations, acoustic management, clock synch

There is an enterprise version of the software which has two parts: A server part called Hard Disk Sentinel Enterprise Server is able to centralize the management of client's desktops/laptops through a single console, to for example be alerted of when problem occurs on client's computer.  And a client part which needs to be installed on each desktop which needs to be monitored.

In addition there is also Portable Pro version available which can be executed from USB stick to run diags, tests etc. The portable version cannot run as a service or start with Windows.

Screenshot from the UI:

How does Hard Disk Sentinel work?

HDD Sentinel runs in the background and verifies SSD / HDD health status by inspecting the SMART status of the disk(s). If an error is found or unexpected behaviour is detected, it warns the user about the current situation and also can perform appropriate actions (for example, start an automatic backup).

Usually, hard disk health status may slowly decline, from day to day. The SMART monitoring technology can predict HDD failure by examining the critical values of the disk drive. Compared to other software, Hard Disk Sentinel detects and reports every disk problem. It is much more sensitive to disk failures and can display better and more detailed information about hard disk expected life and the problems found (if any). This is a more sophisticated way to predict failures than the “traditional” method: checking S.M.A.R.T. attribute thresholds and values only

HDD Sentinel can be found at hdsentinel.com website, it's distributed as a shareware. You can also visit a FAQ page which gives you further detail about features, supported hardware (RAID cards) and functions.