PassMark DiskCheckup™ - FREE for personal use!

PassMark DiskCheckup™ allows the user to monitor the SMART attributes of a particular hard disk drive. SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a feature on a computer's hard disk for providing various monitoring indicators of disk reliability. If SMART is enabled on a hard disk, the system administrator can receive analytical information from the hard drive to determine a possible future failure of the hard drive.

SMART monitors elements of possible long term drive failure, such as 'Spin Up Time', the number of start/stops, the number of hours powered on and the hard disk temperature.

DiskCheckup displays the current values of the SMART attributes, along with the Threshold value for that attribute. If an attribute drops below its threshold, the drive cannot guarantee that it will be able to meet its specifications in the future.

Note that SMART attributes change slowly over time and are helpful attempts to diagnose the life span of a particular drive. DiskCheckup monitors these changes over a long period and predict the date (if available) of the Threshold Exceed Condition (TEC), which is displayed on the main window.

DiskCheckup also displays device information, such as the drive geometry, serial number, model number, media rotation rate, and supported features.

E-mail notification when Threshold Exceed Condition detected
DiskCheckup can be configured to perform e-mail notification when a SMART attribute has been detected to be less than the allowable threshold value. Such threshold values are determined by the hard disk manufacturer. For a drive to be considered "good", all the SMART attributes must be above these values. Different SMART attributes have different threshold values. For more configuration options, refer to the screen shot below.

System requirements
A hard drive that supports SMART, plus compatible drivers. Most recent hard drives (SATA/USB/FireWire) are OK but drives connected via SCSI or hardware RAID are not supported. Drives configured as software RAID (dynamic disks) via Windows Disk Management will also work.

Known issues

• Hardware RAID and SCSI are not supported. But dynamic disks (software RAID) are supported.
• The Silicon Image SIL0680 Ultra-133 ATA RAID Controller has a bug which can cause a system lockup when the SMART data is accessed.. This bug exists in the current driver version, 1.0.1.7 and presumably in previous versions.
• TEC predictions about future failure dates should be taken as a guide only and should not be considered accurate.
• The majority of newer drives connected via USB and Firewire are supported. However, older drives may not be supported due to the protocol bridge on the hard disk not supporting SMART commands)

DiskCheckup is free for personal use.

PassMark DiskCheckup ™


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That's a really good piece of software. Very informative. Also, they have a lot of other performance related software for trial. Burn in software for "breaking in" your computer, and stress testers.

As soon as this folding job completes, I plan to run their BurnIn Test 6.0 on my notebook, to see what kind of shape it's in. It heavily loads all of the major subsystems on your computer, thoroughly exercising it. That will give me some idea of what's left in it.

Thanks for the heads up, Nibiru!

Cat