Recently one of my hard disks crashed and took all my data along with it. I was shocked and surprised too, because it was only a three months old hard disk. Obviously, I applied to the hard disk manufacturer for a replacement and they shipped a brand new hard disk quickly. But my years of data that I had copied on it was gone. I wish I could have known it beforehand, so that I had enough time to backup my data elsewhere. Learning from this lesson the hard way, now I use Acronis Drive Monitor – a free tool for Windows to monitor the health of all your hard disks.
Acronis Drive Monitor is created by a well trusted name in the industry. It helps you monitor the health of your hard disks on servers, workstations and PCs. It continuously monitors the critical S.M.A.R.T parameters for your hard disks as well as their temperature and flags a warning if they exceed a pre-specified value. It also checks if you have a backup software installed and warns you if you have not. A backup software is needed so that even in the unfortunate event of a hard disk crashing, you have your important files safely backed up.
You can download the Acronis Drive Monitor from the Acronis website. It is free for personal and business use. The download is a setup installer of around 19 megabytes in size. After the installation, it places an icon in the notification area (also called system tray) of Windows in the lower-right corner of your screen. You can right-click on it to open the Acronis Drive Monitor window.
When the Acronis Drive Monitor windows shows up, you can see the summary of your hard disk’s status, backup software and critical events. A green checkmark next to a category ensures that everything in the category is okay while a yellow exclamation is a warning that something is not right. You can click on any of these categories (disks, backup or critical events) to open the details of the respective category.
In the Disks category, you can see the details of all your installed hard disks. All the models and makes of hard disks are supported including RAID configurations. It shows disk overview, S.M.A.R.T data and any related critical events (like if temperature reached above the limit). In the Backup category, it shows if you have installed an Acronis Backup software. Unfortunately, the backup software of any other companies are not supported. In the critical events, you can see any critical events related to data loss on your hard disks.
You can open the Options dialog for Acronis Drive Monitor by clicking on the options button at the top in the main window. In the Options window, you can set alerts through e-mail, warning temperature levels for hard disks, critical events monitoring etc. You can also choose which hard disks you want to be monitored. You can enable or disable backup software monitoring for various disk partitions as well.
Acronis Drive Monitor is a free and informative tool to monitor your hard disk health status. It combines the S.M.A.R.T. data from your hard disks with the temperature from your hard disk sensors and Windows logs of any data loss events to give you warnings if your hard disk is going to fail. It can save you from the trouble by foretelling you of an oncoming hard disk crash. Today when we pack our large hard disks with all our personal data like videos, pictures and more, the Acronis Drive Monitor is a must to have application. You can download it from http://www.acronis.com/…/drive-monitor/.