15-Minute Reviews :: Hard Drive Inspector NE (Notebook Edition) v2.42

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Hard Drive Inspector NE version 2.42 by Altrix Software – An application to check and monitor the condition of your hard drives in a notebook to minimize the chance of data loss.

A note; This is just a newer and slightly modified version from my last reviews ( Hard Drive Inspector v2.2 and Hard Drive Inspector ) – This review will only note major differences as well as thoughts.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states: (Shortened)

“Hard Drive Inspector NE is a powerful, effective and easy-to-use program that monitors hard drive health. This edition has all the functionality of the Professional version, but also takes into account specific features of notebooks.

The value of information stored on an average computer hard drive often exceeds the value of the computer itself. But a hard drive is one of the most unreliable internal computer devices. When it crashes (which happens quite frequently), the stored information will be lost fully or partially. Subsequent information recovery is either not possible at all, or constitutes a very sophisticated and expensive procedure that can beperformed only by specialists.”

Quick Pros

• Simple to use interface – Easy to understand
• SMART details are made to be easy to read
• Temperature gauge handy
• Drive specification information provided
• Log trending as well
• Features more geared towards notebooks
• Now displays in summary window if drive is PATA or SATA

Quick Cons

• Does not detect my SATA RAID 0 array
• Not recommended for desktop use due to inscreased temperature warning

Expansion

Not too much has changed since the last review of Professional; Still easy to use and understand; The details are laid out in a manner that they actually make sense with an even-easier summary page to display you percentages, and much more. (Really, not much has really changed; Check the most recent review here )

This edition however sports a lot of behind-the-scenes changes (according to the author’s website) such as an increased threshold temperature and disabling of SMART reads while sleeping. Besides this, I can’t find any other specific laptop-orientated features besides these explicitly stated, but it is an important featureset none the less. There is apparently a feature geared towards shaking issues (both insufficient power supply and high temperatures fall under the above features) but I can’t find what explicitly what that would be as a specific feature; Maybe more weight placed on spin retry count, calibration retry account or other similar SMART functions when it comes to the percentages in the Health Summary.

One nice add-in that I noticed over the previous editions was the displaying of what kind of drive the report is about; PATA or SATA. This is a handy add-in since I previously had issues identifying which drive was which since I did have one SATA and one PATA of the same size in my computer.

I must admit, I am disappointed that there still is no RAID support for my system; As mentioned before, this is where I really would like to have some feedback on. Especially in RAID 0 but RAID 1 (and possibly others) could really benefit from an application as this one to monitor the hard drive. You could swap out a RAID 1 drive for a rebuilt before failure and potential double-failure occur. You could start planning for a full backup and reinstall when a RAID 0 drive is about to dump. While you may be injecting that you have never seen a laptop with RAID support; Some companies are starting to filter RAID into their computers for reliability or performance. Alienware’s m9700 for example does have RAID support.

One last note: While this is handy for laptops and notebooks, as mentioned by the author the temperature threshold has been increased because hard drives in notebooks and laptops run hotter; I wouldn’t recommend using this for your desktop unless you only intend on using the SMART portion; Desktop hard drives are intended to run cooler and if you go to the laptop’s critical temperature, it may already be too late for your desktop.

Final Verdict

As mentioned before, this application, while it does have its downfalls, is decent application. If you have a RAID array set up, you might as well stick to your choice of other SMART monitoring applications that support your array. As mentioned, I would use this one for just your notebook or laptops unless you don’t plan on relying on the hard drive temperature gauge. While free, if you have a laptop/notebook, I recommend picking this up to give a try. As for paying $39.95, while the price seems a bit steep concidering the lack of support for RAID, RAID is not very common amonst laptops/notebooks. It depends on how much you value your data and having another means to monitor your data’s integrity or potential for failure.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, June 22, 2007