Free S.M.A.R.T. app?

May 18, 2005 1:07 AM

I need a free S.M.A.R.T. drive diagnostic app that will run in my systray and poll my drive every so often and warn me if there are problems. I've found a few but nothing free. Come on, there's gotta be at least one. WinXP.
posted by skallas to computers & internet (5 comments total)

HDDhealth is one. Pros, cons, I can't really say. It does what it's supposed to do.

I seem to remember seeing a bunch on sourceforge and cnet.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 2:24 AM on May 18, 2005

First a warning:
I hope this is fixed now, but
I have heard that some WinXP disk drivers?
have/had a lockup problem when SMART polling during a disk error.
I suspect I had that rare problem on an added PCI controller.
I had to boot to safe mode, backup, reformat to get the bad sector marked bad to stop the lockups.

I use DTemp to check HD temp. It can also check SMART. It is free from
http://www.private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/
(I have no experience with the SMART test part)

I have seen problems with some other SMART monitors
showing pending fail on a seagate drive that passes Seagate's own diagnostics, so verify your results.
(The report was the same 39% on 3 different drives)
Also, an annual check with the manufacturer's diags may be good if you need to be sure.
posted by Charles the Friend at 8:00 AM on May 18, 2005

I use DTemp mostly for drive temp monitoring, and it seems to work pretty well, the SMART side of DTemp has warned me on a few occasions about a failing drive, one time correctly, twice when the drive was fine.
posted by Cosine at 8:37 AM on May 18, 2005

I've been using HDDHealth, from Panterasoft. Freebie, stable, seems to work.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:04 AM on May 18, 2005

I second (or third) HDDHealth - I use it on Windows 2000 at work, and Windows XP and home.
posted by exhilaration at 12:53 PM on May 18, 2005