News :: 15MR: Hard Drive Inspector
Hello and welcome to another episode of 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Hard Drive Inspector by Altrix Software—This application is a SMART drivw monitor
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“Hard Drive Inspector is a powerful, convenient and effective program based on the S.M.A.R.T. technology, which allows controlling health of your hard disk drives.
Most computer users argue that information stored on their computer is the most valuable element of the computer system. With the help of the S.M.A.R.T. System, Hard Drive Inspector allows you to predict a possible failure of the HDD before this occurs. As the access to electronic information becomes more and more vital in business and at home, Hard Drive Inspector allows exceeding the traditional limits of HDDs reliability, thus extending the level of valuable user data protection.
Hard Drive Inspector has a flexible option system, which allows you to customize the functionality of this utility, according to your needs. Hard Drive Inspector has an easy-to-use, nice-looking interface. It also offers many useful features, which make the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring process full-scale and easy.
Quick Pros
- Simple to use interface
- Easy to understand
- SMART details are made to be easy to read
- Lots of detail
- Temperature gauge handy
- Drive specification information provided
- Log trending as well
Quick Cons
- Not USB drive compatible without modifications
- Does not detect my SATA RAID 0 setup
- Misreports my capacity
Expansion
This application has been designed very nicely. Easy to get around, easy to understand for people who have never handled SMART before is great. As noticed by the Pros, there are a lot of features in this application that I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in a single package with other SMART applications. Granted, the three key indicators on the front page of the application are interpretive, it does do a pretty good job based on what SMART says it should have and what the manufacturer has stated.
My first problem is that, as usual, this application denote ‘Pro’ version, yet no support for portability and using from a USB drive or CD directly, a pertinent part for use as any technician’s tool. With how this day is, I do not want to be installing half a dozen tools on a clients system to uninstall them each and every time, a time-consuming process and could clog up a clients system worse. I would have used this application from a USB drive if I didn’t have to butcher it.
My second issue was that it did not detect my raid array at all. This is not a good thing. RAID drives still give off SMART data (I know, I have an application which picks it up.) I would have hoped it did, but unfortunately it didn’t. I’m running RAID off of my N NForce 4 for my other two drives in my rig. I am more concerned the health of those two than my data drive. Double the drives, single the data, and you have about double the failure chance.
My last beef is with the capacity indicator. My data drive is a pitiful 20GB drive. Somehow this application is reading my drive as 147GB. Concerns me a bit to the accuracy of the application if it can’t get the capacity right.
Final Verdict
If keeping your data is important, you have no intentions of diving into SMART and its information, and you have non-RAID drives, this application is for you. While free it is a great price, I would be concerned for paying $29.95 due to my issues above. I would have hoped that the features would have covered RAID, portability and the accuracy of the data. If the capacity issue is fixed, accuracy of the SMART read is confirmed and RAID supported, it would possibly be worth $29.95. I feel, with all ‘technician-like’ applications, there should always be a portable version available that the licencing goes with the application, or like Sticky Password, the application can install itself onto a USB drive. This application could deal to have two versions, a ‘Standard’ version (Like this one) and then a ‘Professional’ or ‘Technicians’ version with the USB drive support. If the bugs were fixed and USB drive support added, I would definitely pay $29.95, and possibly higher.
Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, February 20, 2007
