Your consumers photos, your tourist videos, your diary and notebook, messages from friends, business information and documents - are you ready to lose it all at once? Normally, the hard disk errors happen unexpectedly. How much would the hard disk information loss cost you? Does your hard drive - the heart of your PC - feels healthy? Imagine a world where the peripheral devices on your PC signaled you before they were going to fail thus, allowing you to backup that critical status report to your boss before the device went south. Yes you can. It is not a dream as long as you have a powerful and handy disk performance and usage monitor utility. Need not to find it here and there. I will commend an excellent disk monitors to you now. That is Hard Disk Sentinel Professional which was published by H.d.s. Hungary. Follow me and take your time to choice a favorite disk monitor yourself.

Hard Disk Sentinel Professional is a multi-OS HDD monitoring and HDD analysis application. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair hard disk drive problems, report and display HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel Professional automatically monitors our hard disk status, health and performance, including temperature and S.M.A.R.T. values for each of our hard drives. Using this data it can predict possible disk failures and alert us of these conditions before they can become a serious problem. We can configure email and sound alerts as well as automatic system shutdown when certain criteria are met. Hard Disk Sentinel Professional can even perform automatic file backups, copying our important data to a different drive if a problem is found. In addition to monitoring and alerting, Hard Disk Sentinel Professional also keeps an eye on our disk performance with real-time disk usage and transfer speed graphs.

The key functions and features of Hard Disk Sentinel Professional include:

1. Easy to use interface - All information are displayed in the main window of the application. Quick controls allow easy navigation to access all hard disks, partitions and different information. Intuitive user interface elements display information by using green/yellow/red color to indicate the level of problem. Detailed text description and context sensitive help guides the user thru the features and options.

2. Instant S.M.A.R.T. analyzing - Hard Disk Sentinel Professional can communicate with IDE, Serial ATA, SCSI and some special USB hard disks to detect their status and temperature. Disk status is displayed immediately as we launch the application, there is no need to analyze disks for a long period.

3. Information on demand - Current hard disk temperatures and health can be displayed on the system tray, in a small status window and on the desktop itself. Average and maximum temperatures are logged for all hard disks and this information is displayed in graphs for statistical purposes.

4. Hard Disk Hardware Testing - By using Hard Disk Sentinel Professional, it is possible to start hardware hard disk self tests. These tests can be used to effectively find all hard disk problems because built-in hardware methods are used to verify hard disk components (for example heads, servo, and internal buffer in the Short self test).

5. Logging - Hard Disk Sentinel logs all degradations in all SMART parameters. For example, if a new uncorrectable sector is found on our hard disk, we will be notified.

6. Alerts - Hard Disk Sentinel Professional can make different kind of alerts upon different problems. It can execute various tasks (even external applications) in case of a problem. There is an option to send daily emails about current status.

7. Hard Disk Details - Detects and displays every information about the hard disk, from the revision number and buffer size to all features it has. The maximum available and current transfer modes are also displayed.

8. Hard Disk Performance - Logs how much data were read from or written to the hard disk. Displays current transfer rates for both reading and writing and estimates the maximum available (theoretical) transfer rate for a particular hard disk.

9. Hard Disk Partitions - Displays partitions for each physical hard disks and type and usage information about them so we cannot run out of space. Hard Disk Sentinel Professional sends this information automatically in alert/status messages.

10. Shutdown - Hard Disk Sentinel Professional offers option to shut down the computer on failure, overheat or parameter degradation. This option can be used to prevent further data loss.

11. Acoustic Management - Hard Disk Sentinel Professional offers option to control the acoustic level of IDE/S-ATA hard disk. It is possible to increase performance or make the disks more silent. Clock Synchronization - Hard Disk Sentinel Professional offers option to synchronize the PC clock with an atomic clock via NTP (Network Time Protocol).

12. Backup - In Hard Disk Sentinel Professional, wide range of backup methods are available: to backup data to local computer, to a LAN server or to a remote FTP (or to a mail) server. It is even possible to use 3rd party tools to create archives or burn media. Hard Disk Sentinel can manage power status of remote computers in the network.

In addition, Hard Disk Sentinel Professional provides a free trial for us but only can be free used 30 days and some functions of it are disabled. It is standalone software and does not need any extra software and hardware requirement. Hard Disk Sentinel Professional does not contain any adware or spyware. It works with most recent variants of Windows and its current version is 2.50. The price of the registration version is only $35.00 and we can get update and upgrade free. With all these features, simple interface, excellent usability, low cost and free trial period - why are you still reading? Install Hard Disk Sentinel Professional to protect yourself from a possible data loss in case of an unexpected disk failure.

Hard Disk Sentinel Professional automatically monitors your hard disk status, health and performance, including temperature and S.M.A.R.T. values for each of your hard drives. Using this data it can predict possible disk failures and alert you of these conditions before they can become a serious problem. You can configure email and sound alerts as well as automatic system shutdown when certain criteria are met. The software can even perform automatic file backups, copying your important data to a different drive if a problem is found. In addition to monitoring and alerting, the software also keeps an eye on your disk performance with real-time disk usage and transfer speed graphs. Other features include daily status reports, disk space monitoring, integrated backup with CD/DVD burning, run as service option and more. Hard Disk Sentinel Professional supports IDE, SATA and SCSI drives.

Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS HDD monitoring and HDD analysis application. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair hard disk drive problems, report and display HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the HDD inside the computer or in an external enclosure (USB / e-SATA). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.

Hard Disk Sentinel monitors hard disk drive / HDD status, including health, temperature and all S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, built in most hard disks today) values for each hard disks. Also it measures the hard disk transfer speed in real time which can be used as a benchmark or to detect possible hard disk failures, performance degradations.

HDSentinel is the perfect data protection solution: it can be impactfully used to prevent HDD failure and HDD data loss because it has the most sensitive hard disk health rating system which is extremely sensitive to disk problems. This way even a small HDD problem can't be missed. The Professional version has scheduled and automatic (on-problem) disk backup options to prevent data loss caused by not only failure but by malware or accidental delete also.

HDD Sentinel runs in the background and analyses the SMART status of hard disk(s). If an error found or unexpected behaviour detected, it warns the user about the current situation and also it can perform actions (for example to start an automatic backup).

Usually, hard disk status may slowly decline, from day to day. The SMART monitoring technology can help to predict HDD failure by monitoring the critical values of the disk drive. Compared to other software, Hard Disk Sentinel detects and reports every disk problem which is much more sensitive method to predict failures than checking S.M.A.R.T. attribute thresholds and values only. For more information, please read how S.M.A.R.T. works and why Hard Disk Sentinel is different.

Features
Easy to use interface
All information are displayed in the main window of the application. Quick controls allow easy navigation to access all hard disks, partitions and different information. Intuitive user interface elements display information by using green/yellow/red color to indicate the level of problem. Detailed text description and context sensitive help guides the user thru the features and options.

Instant S.M.A.R.T. analysing
Hard Disk Sentinel can communicate with IDE, Serial ATA, SCSI and some special USB hard disks to detect their status and temperature. Disk status are displayed immediately as you launch the application, there is no need to analyse disks for a long period. It displays the current and maximum temperature for the hard disk. It reads all general and vendor-specific attributes and monitor their values. For advanced users, all raw data are displayed also including power-on time and number of read/write errors. Hard Disk Sentinel interprets the performance and fitness related S.M.A.R.T. values and displays the calculated Performance and Health percentage, total power on time and estimated lifetime remaining.

Disk status in Windows Explorer
View the current health status and used space in Windows
Explorer or in any other application, so you'll always know the
amount of used space for each partitions and the disk condition.

Information on demand
Current hard disk temperatures and health can be displyed on the system tray, in a small status window and on the desktop itself. Average and maximum temperatures are logged for all hard disks and these informations are displayed in graphs for statistical purposes.

Hard Disk Hardware Testing
By using Hard Disk Sentinel, it is possible to start hardware hard disk self tests. These tests can be used to impactfully find all hard disk problems because built-in hardware methods are used to verify hard disk components (for example heads, servo, internal buffer in the Short self test). The Extended self test also verifies the complete disk surface, finds and repairs all "weak" areas and re-allocates the possible bad sectors. This is not possible with the software-based disk surface scan methods (for example, by using scandisk).

Logging
Hard Disk Sentinel logs all degradations in all SMART parameters. For example, if a new uncorrectable sector is found on your hard disk, you will be notified.

Alerts
Hard Disk Sentinel can make different kind of alerts upon different problems. It can execute various tasks (even external applications) in case of a problem. There is an option to send daily emails about current status.

Hard Disk Details
Detects and displays every information about the hard disk, from the revision number and buffer size to all features it has. The maximum available and current transfer modes are also displayed.

Hard Disk Performance
Logs how much data were read from or written to the hard disk. Displays current transfer rates for both reading and writing and estimates the maximum available (theoretical) transfer rate for a particular hard disk.

Hard Disk Partitions
Displays partitions for each physical hard disks and type and usage informations about them so you cannot run out of space. Hard Disk Sentinel sends this information automatically in alert/status messages.

Shutdown
It offers option to shut down the computer on failure, overheat or parameter degradation. This option can be used to prevent further data loss.

Acoustic Management
Offers option to control the acoustic level of IDE/S-ATA hard disk. It is possible to increase performance or make the disks more silent. Unique feature: control the acoustic level of your external USB hard disk (if your USB enclosure is built around Cypress AT2+ chip).

Clock Synchronization
It offers option to synchronize the PC clock with an atomic clock via NTP (Network Time Protocol).

Backup
In the Professional version, wide range of backup methods are available: to backup data to local computer, to a LAN server or to a remote FTP (or to a mail) server. It is even possible to use 3rd party tools to create archives or burn media. Hard Disk Sentinel can manage power status of remote computers in the network.

The license of this software is Free Trial Software, the price is EUR28.00, you can free download and get a free trial.