What to know how?

Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a multi-OS SSD and HDD monitoring and analysis software. Its goal is to find, test, diagnose and repair hard 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 and in external enclosures (USB / e-SATA). Many different alerts and report options are available to ensure maximum safety of your valuable data.

No need to use separate tools to verify internal hard disks, external hard disks, SSDs, disks in RAID arrays as these are all included in a single software.
Hard Disk Sentinel monitors hard disk drive / HDD status including health, temperature and all S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) values for all hard disks. Also it measures the disk transfer speed in real time which can be used as a benchmark or to detect possible hard disk failures, performance degradations.


HDSentinel is the perfect data protection solution: it can be effectively used to prevent HDD failure and SSD / HDD data loss because it has the most sensitive disk health rating system which is extremely sensitive to disk problems. This way even a small HDD problem can't be missed. The Professional version has scheduled and automatic (on-problem) disk backup options to prevent data loss caused by not only failure but by malware or accidental delete also.

How does Hard Disk Sentinel work?

HDD Sentinel runs in the background and verifies SSD / HDD health status by inspecting the SMART status of the disk(s). If an error is found or unexpected behaviour is detected, it warns the user about the current situation and also can perform appropriate actions (for example, start an automatic backup).
Usually, hard disk health status may slowly decline, from day to day. The SMART monitoring technology can predict HDD failure by examining the critical values of the disk drive. Compared to other software, Hard Disk Sentinel detects and reports every disk problem. It is much more sensitive to disk failures and can display better and more detailed information about hard disk expected life and the problems found (if any). This is a more sophisticated way to predict failures than the "traditional" method: checking S.M.A.R.T. attribute thresholds and values only. For more information, please read how hard disk S.M.A.R.T. works and why Hard Disk Sentinel is different.

The software displays the current hard disk temperature and logs maximum and average HDD temperatures. This may be used to check the maximum temperature under high hard disk load. For the importance of the hard disk operating temperature, see the Frequently Asked Questions. Please click here to see the list of features or our products for hard disk monitoring.

Do I need Hard Disk Sentinel?

If you are using a computer equipped with at least one hard disk or solid state disk and you want to ensure that your data will be available any time, then the answer is YES. Hard Disk Sentinel is especially designed to you if

• you are using multiple hard disks / SSDs in your computer (IDE / Serial ATA (S-ATA, e-SATA) / SCSI / SAS / USB) or in an external enclosure
  (check the hardware compatibility pages for the list of compatible hardware)
• you are using a mobile / removable rack or enclosure with hard disk inside
• you are using notebook computer
• you are using server or desktop computers with high disk load
• you want to maximize system stability, HDD performance and overall integrity, receive HDD alert on high temperature or low health
• you do not want to lose your sensitive and valuable data, do not want to pay for HDD recovery

It is much better to avoid HDD failure than use HDD recovery. Be alerted and prevent HDD data loss with HDSentinel ! Be your HDD life healthy.

Solid State Disk (SSD) Support

Solid state disks do not contain any moving parts. Because of this, they may tolerate physical vibrations and shock better than hard disks. But they have other kind of problems: write cycles wear the electronic parts so lots of delete and write operations may also damage them. Wear leveling feature can help in this situation but the problem is not fully eliminated.
Current SSD technology also has another problem: solid state disks may "forget" data with time. To prevent this, periodic complete overwrites can refresh the storage device - but because of its nature this also reduces the lifetime of the solid state disk.

From the viewpoint of the computer and software, SSD devices act like hard disks. They support many features of hard disks, including S.M.A.R.T. and this allows Hard Disk Sentinel to detect and display health and lifetime also for solid state disks. This is true for most modern SSD devices from Intel, MTron, OCZ, Samsung, etc. Check the Solid State Disk Compatibility for more details.
Hard Disk Sentinel can detect and display SSD health also. This may help to identify when the SSD needs to be replaced to prevent data loss from it.

Further SSD support is constantly added to new versions. If you are using any type of solid state disks or hybrid disks, please use the Send test report to developer option. All reports help in future development to display solid state disk health of different type of SSDs also.