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Hard Drive Utilities

Active SMART (Free Trial) - checks hard drive status, including smart thresholds, temperature. Aesthetic main GUI provides colorful, clear status on Disk Health, Performance and Temperature.  SMART information is presented efficiently and includes Threshold, Value, Worst and Status, and T.E.C. Date (predicted date of Threshold Exceeded Condition) for all Attributes. Pop up notification occurs for incremental changes thus forcasting potential problems well in advance of failure.

INFORMATION:  Active SMART Online help - provides a nice overview of S.M.A.R.T. technology as well as helpful information on the use of Active SMART

S.M.A.R.T. Attributes Meaning

Intelli-SMART (Free Trial) - checks hard drive status, including smart thresholds, monitors drive status, various notification options, polished GUI. Very light resource usage (less than 1500K)

Belarc Advisor - checks hard drive S.M.A.R.T. status in addition to providing a wealth of system info, free for personal use

HDD Health - checks hard drive status, including smart thresholds

HDD Life (Free Trial) - checks hard drive status, including smart thresholds

DiskCheckup (Free Trial) - checks hard drive status including smart thresholds, free for personal use

Drive Health (Free Trial) - checks hard drive status, including smart thresholds, limited feature unregistered version has no time limit, monitors drive

Fujitsu Hard Drive Diagnostic Tool - for use with Fujitsu hard drives only

Seagate Seatools for Windows - hard drive diagnostic, a number of diagnostic tests function on any hard drive, tool first scans for supported drives, then displays each drive model number, firmware revision, serial number, drive and test status.

Disk Investigator - bypasses operating system to read raw drive sectors. Potentially useful to confirm effectiveness of file deletion and in any event is certainly an interesting freeware tool

Raxco Online Fragmentation Analyzer - analyze fragmentation status online, uses ActiveX

Stellar Smart (Free Trial) - S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic tool, provides detailed S.M.A.R.T. status information such as Spin Up Time, Seek Error Rate, Temperature and 27 other Attributes, displays drive fitness as a percentage rather than pass-fail. Monitors hard drive continuously in the background to forecast any potential hard drive problems well in advance of failure. Light resource usage (less than 4500K total)

SIGuardian (Free Trial) - checks hard drive status, including smart thresholds

HDDTemperature - freeware product monitors hard drive temperature, adjustable icon color