DiskCheckup Editor's Review

DiskCheckup is a small but very useful program, which can be used to monitor the health status of your hard drives permanently.

In order to use the program, your hard drives need to have S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology) enabled as the program compares your current hard drives' attributes with the T.E.C. (Threshold Exceed Condition) values determined by the manufacturer of your hard drives.

The program will group the data gathered in two sections: 'Device Info' and 'S.M.A.R.T. Info'. In the 'Device Info' section, you will see info such as device capacity, serial number, model number, firmware revisions, partitions, IDE registers, general config, buffer type and size, ECC size, PIO and DMA timing, etc.

In the 'S.M.A.R.T. Info section, you will find data regarding raw read error rate, spin up time, start/stop count, temperature, etc. For each item, the program also displays a raw value, a status, a value, a worst value, a threshold, and a predicted T.E.C. date. If the T.E.C. date appears to be unknown, your disk is healthy and there is no reason to be worried about anything. In case the T.E.C. value appears to be a close date, you'd better backup your data, as the drive might soon crash.

The program detects only the normal, gradual deterioration of a hard disk. It can't predict catastrophic failures due to external reasons such as a power outage.

Pluses: You can manually set a temperature warning level. In case the hard drive approaches the Threshold Exceed Condition, you may be notified by a message window or an email.

Drawbacks / flaws: More information regarding the partitions would have been a good idea.

In conclusion: A very useful solution for those who store critical data.

version reviewed: 2.1