To avoid these risks users should monitor the temperature of their PC. Not constantly but every know and then to make sure that they do not rise to critical levels.

Disk Alarm can monitor one hard drive of the computer. The free program displays a selection for one of the connected hard drives and will update the program interface immediately with the drive’s name and temperature.

This temperature reading gets updated frequently. Users from the United States can switch to Fahrenheit, everyone else in the world should be fine with the degrees in Celsius.

One interesting feature is an alarm that can be configured if the disk temperature rises above a specified temperature level. Visual alarms are displayed in this case, with the option to add sounds to the alarm as well.

The program can be set to be always on top, or placed in the system tray where a tooltip displays the current drive temperature on mouse over.

Disk Alarm is a tiny program for Windows that requires elevated rights to be started, at least under Vista and Windows 7. The program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

Physical Disk Speed Monitor is a lightweight portable software for Windows that can do just that. All it takes to monitor a hard drive in realtime is to select its drive letter from the list of connected drives.

The application starts the monitoring right away and displays the read and write speeds of the drive in the program interface.

The read and write speed of the selected drive is displayed in MB, and there is an option to display the total read and write speed.

A few applications for Physical Disk Speed Monitor come to mind. The program may be used to find out how taxing a specific application is, and if the drive is able to handle those performance needs. It may also be used to benchmark a drive to see if a drive delivers the speeds advertised. This can be helpful in determining if a drive is about to fail, as low speeds can be a sign of a nearing disk failure.

Physical Disk Speed Monitor requires the Microsoft .net Framework. It has been tested under a 64-bit edition of Windows 7, and will run on most Windows operating systems. The program is available for download at the developer website.

The HDD Profiler provides a semi-automated way of monitoring a specific hard drive or folder for these changes. The portable software program creates snapshots of selected folders. These snapshots can then be loaded into the software program at a later time to compare them with the current state of the hard drive or folder. The Hard Drive Profiler will then display the changes that have been made in the meantime (that is the time between the initial snapshot and comparison) in various tabs that provide an excellent overview.

The computer program will for instance notice new and deleted folders and files or modified file names and files. It will basically catch any modification in the monitored folders or hard drives and report them in its interface. The changes that have been noticed can be saved in a log file so that they can be accessed at a later time in the application. The format can also be opened in text editors.

The interface is divided into various tabs including removed files, modified files or accessed files that make it easier to spot specific modifications. HDD Profiler can be downloaded from the developer’s website. The program is compatible with Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 9x and Windows ME according to the homepage. It is likely that it will work under Windows Vista or Windows 7 as well.