To borrow from HD Sentinel’s website, it’s a “multi-OS HDD/SSD monitoring and analysis application. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair disk drive problems, report and display SSD and HDD health, performance degradations and failures. Hard Disk Sentinel gives complete textual description, tips and displays/reports the most comprehensive information about the hard disks and solid state disks inside the computer or in external enclosures (USB/e-SATA). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.”

It’s a godsend to someone like me who’s running a large-ish number of HDDs in various PCs 24/7, all through the year. HD Sentinel has so far prevented three catastrophic data losses, simply by sending me an early warning e-mail about an impending HDD failure. This has allowed me to back-up or move important data to a safer location, then replace the drive with a new one. HD Sentinel can analyse all hard disks attached to a PC, including those that are connected to a RAID controller.

I have an external HDD cradle, connected via USB to a PC running HD Sentinel. This lets me perform quick analysis on a hard drive; I simply pop the drive in the cradle, let Windows mount the drive, then open up HD Sentinel to check the condition of the HDD.

The application can be configured to suit your needs. For example, you can tell it to e-mail you an incredibly detailed report about the PC it’s running on, with plenty of information about installed hardware and software. I like my information short and concise, so HD Sentinel e-mails me some basic info only when a HDD’s health drops below a pre-set level:

Let’s run through HD Sentinel’s UI quickly.

Top left corner lists all the HDDs attached to the PC. You can get a good idea of all your HDDs condition at a glimpse. As you can see, one of the HDDs is feeling poorly and its health is down to 23%. In the overview tab on the right you’ll get a more detailed description as to what is happening with the HDD in question. HD Sentinel also gives you an estimate of the drive’s remaining lifetime, based on the drive’s past performance and development of health issues. As for the HDD depicted in the screenshot, it might be a good idea to start copying the data elsewhere.

This tab shows you the drive’s temperature, both current and history. Like the blue text says, you should calibrate the temp to get correct values. I haven’t done that, but it’s obvious I should probably do something about the airflow around my HDDs.

Here’s something for all you geeks out there. This is the S.M.A.R.T. information HD Sentinel has read off the disk. Me, I get by just fine with the Overview tab.

I forgot to grab a screenshot of the Information tab. It contains row after row of information about the selected HDD, beginning with Summary, moving on to ATA information, HDD’s current Acoustic Management settings, a list of supported ATA and S-ATA Features, and a whole lot more.

Log screen lists all the problems encountered with the HDD.

Disk Performance tab gives you information such as HDD’s total data reads and writes, average reads and writes per day, current and average transfer rates, and so on and so forth. Finally, the Alerts tab lists all events serious enough to warrant an e-mail to the system operator.

HD Sentinel is a tool worth buying and using. I’m running it in all my PCs, and if there’s anything negative to say about it… well, I hope I could run it in all my various NAS boxes as well.