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 hard disks / e-SATA hard disks). 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. See the list of Features of Hard Disk Sentinel Professional 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 hard disks) 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.

22 Feb 2013 Hard Disk Sentinel 4.30 released
- Improvements and new features, improved hardware support:
* important update for hard disks / SSDs connected to motherboards with Intel chipsets
* important update for multi-drive enclosures (port multiplier and RAID enclosures)
* important update for various SSDs (Corsair Force GT SSDs, Samsung SSDs, etc.)
* display progress (% complete) on application button during hard disk surface test
* improved support of VANTEX HX4R, Chieftec, Sans Digital external RAID enclosures
* improved support for LSI SAS/SATA RAID controllers and DELL SAS/SATA RAID controllers
* improved support and health detection for various Seagate hard disks, for example Seagate Thin hard disks and Seagate hard disks with special firmware
* improved support for Areca RAID controllers, accessing hard disks and SSDs in different connected enclosures, displaying enclosure number and slot number
* improved support of JMicron JMB36X / Gigabyte GBB36X / HighPoint / VIA RAID controllers under Windows 2003
* added support for newer WD hard disk (WD RED, WD Enterprise RE, etc.)
* support of HighPoint 4522 RAID controller: detecting and displaying connected SATA hard disks (standalone and configured as RAID)
- Bug fixes, further modifications:
* fixed periodic false alarms reported by older Intel chipset drivers (providing invalid S.M.A.R.T. information)
* fixed invalid S.M.A.R.T. information reported by LSI SAS RAID controllers for standalone (non-RAID) SATA drives
* fixed display of volume labels in hard disk selector (upper left area) if one or more partitions have no assigned logical drive letter
* general improvements for Chinese language, fixed hard disk temperature symbol in Sidebar Gadget when Chinese language used
* fixed warranty check for Samsung hard disk drives
* fixed startup problem with Drobo enclosures / devices
* improved real time performance graph display
* improved and more stable dynamic DNS update function