Check your Hard Drives with HDD Health

Hard drives are critical components in every personal computer. They store the data that you are working with and a failure or defect could lead to data loss sometimes without the possibility of recovering the data. Backups are of course a good idea but monitoring the hard drives performance is another method to check if it is likely that your hard drives might be at the end of their life cycle.

HDD Health monitors some of the important key factors of modern hard drives such as temperature, read and seek error rates and performance. If one variable reaches a critical value you are informed by HDD Health and should take counter measures. The first would be making a reliable backup of your hard drive, the second thinking about ways to fix the problematic values.

If the temperature for example is reported to be of critical value you should think of improving the air flow of your case, get hard drive coolers, add more fans or move from air cooling to water cooling. Other errors such as read write errors prove to be more complex. They could be temperature related of course but if the temperature is not critical it is an unlikely reason.

So, the main advantage you get is to receive a report before a crash or hard drive failure occurs giving you time to react and backup your data.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Sunday July 23, 2006 -
Tags:backup, data integrity, data loss, hard disks, hard-drives, hdd health

Responses so far:

1. chris says:

   July 23, 2006 at 5:39 pm

   is there a good freeware backup software? please make suggestions

   Reply
2. Martin says:

   July 23, 2006 at 5:51 pm

   here you go ;) http://www.ghacks.net/2006/01/12/automatically-back-up-your-hard-drive/

   Reply
3. sumit says:

   August 10, 2009 at 12:41 pm

   hi

   Reply