Other important information include the hard drive’s temperature, the health status, the drive letters and supported features. The tool is displaying the S.M.A.R.T. attributes in a list in the main interface. The information are updated regularly. The default value is every 10 minutes but it can be changed from 1 to 60 minutes. It obviously can also be disabled.

An interesting feature of Crystal Disk Info is the ability to control change the Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) and Advanced Power Management (APM) settings of hard drives that support the feature

Sliders can be used to change the Automatic Acoustic Management between Silent and Performance and the Advanced Power Management between Minimal Power and Performance.

The download is currently not working on the software developer’s homepage. All major download portals (Majorgeeks) host the software on the other hand.

The software is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

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The program recognized IDE, SATA, Firewire and SCSI hard disks. A click on Tasks > Identity opens a new window that displays all information that could be gathered about the hard disk including serial, firmware and manufacturer among 50 or so additional parameters. Those information can be printed if desired.

Far more interesting than those are the tests the user can conduct. Tests are divided into surface tests for all hard disks and special SMART tests for hard disks that support SMART.

Four surface tests are available and the user can select additional parameters like Block Size and Start & End LBA. The tests that are available are Read, Verify, Butterfly Read and Erase and only one test can be selected to run simultaneously.

One interesting option of HDD Scan is the ability to manage certain disk features. Available are AAM, APM and PM which translate to Automatic Acoustic Management, Advanced Power Management and Power Management.

The user could use the first to change the noise of the hard disk if that feature is supported. A slight drop in performance would be the consequence but it’s in my opinion well worth it.

HDD Scan is a very interesting application that provides access to features, especially those to change the Automatic Acoustic Management that are not available in many other tools of its kind. It is compatible to Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server. No word on Vista compatibility though.

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