How to Monitor Hard-drive Health with Disk Checkup for Windows?

Hard drive failures can be extremely inconvenient especially when you don’t have a back up of all your data. Data recovery can help to a certain extent only and there are good chances that you won’t be seeing a lot of your precious data again. It would certainly help if you could predict the failure. That is exactly where Disk checkup comes to the rescue. 

S.M.A.R.T Technology

There is a technology called S.M.A.R.T integrated into hard drives. The technology is present in most hard drives that have been released in the last 10-15 years. S.M.A.R.T stands for Self monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology. Disk Checkup makes use of this technology to monitor the health and performance of your hard disk drives. It will compare the current attributes of the hard drive with the Threshold Exceed Condition (TEC) values provided by the manufacturer of the hard disk drive to predict failures of the drives. Users can also set up the program to notify them when TEC values are exceeded. 

The working

Apart from the S.M.A.R.T enabled hard disk drives, Disk Checkup also supports external drives also. But SCSI and hardware RAID are not supported. Disk Checkup displays the various attributes of the hard drives in four tabs. The first tab is the ‘Device info’ tab. This tab provides details like serial number, model number, storage capacity, interface, firmware version, partitions etc. 

The second tab is the S.M.A.R.T info tab. This tab list all the S.M.A.R.T attributes like Raw read error rate, Spin up time, reallocated sector count, Spin retry count etc. This tab will also display the predicted threshold exceed condition (TEC) date. The next tab is the S.M.A.R.T history tab. You can enable S.M.A.R.T history recording by clicking on the configuration button and then by checking the box adjacent to Record S.M.A.R.T attributes for TEC computation. 

You can also set up Disk Checkup to alert you when the TEC value is exceeded. You can either get an alert message window on your desktop or get an email alert depending upon your choice. The fourth tab will allow you to run drive tests. 

One thing to note is that TEC date is displayed only when there are at least 3 set of values. Also a difference between the values recorded should be there. “N.A” will be displayed if the S.M.A.R.T values haven’t changed. 

Download Disk Checkup for Windows