Monitor Your Hard Disk Health with Free DVIS Tool

Hard disks are the place where everything is stored on your computer. It does not matter what type of computer you use – Windows PC, Mac, or Linux based system – all of them store your personal files and operating system files on the hard disk. If your hard disk crashes, you lose all of your important files including your videos, pictures and other type of documents. This is why it is often suggested that you keep a close eye on your hard disk’s health. To know about your hard disk’s health in detail, you can make use of the freeware tool DVIS (short for Drive & Volume Information System). It can tell you if your hard disk is having health problems.

You can download DVIS from the Steitz website. The tool is written by a German programmer, so its user interface contains a mishmash of German and English, but you can understand everything that you have to know about your hard disk easily. The tool requires you to have .NET framework 4.0 to be installed before you can run it.

Upon running the DVIS tool, it asks you for activation but you can simply click on the Activate button and it would start launching the application. In the user interface, you can see the information about various installed physical disk drives. Under the Logical Disk Info section, you can see all the partitions of all of your hard disks. Under the S.M.A.R.T. Information section, you can see the S.M.A.R.T. health status for your hard disk. This section is the most important and you should carefully check the Number of errors while writing to disk value, as it can show you if your hard disk is about to fail. If these values are shown in the red color, then you should seriously consider buying a new hard disk in time.

Disk & Volume Information System

The application has many other sections like USB Devices, P-n-P devices and User information which are not linked directly to your hard disk health but can provide with detailed information about your Windows computer.

Disk & Volume Information System

So if you do not want to lose your valuable data, its time to check your hard disk health with the DVIS tool. It can help you prevent hard disk crashes as some of the errors can easily be fixed by altering your PC hardware configuration. For example, if you are having Number of power-off cycles error, then it may indicate that your power supply unit (PSU) is not supplying enough power. And in most cases, you can fix this error by replacing your power supply with one having a larger wattage capacity.

You can download the DVIS freeware tool from http://www.vs-support.com/html/DViS.htm