Cheap Hard Disk Sentinel Pro for $13.48 on sale.

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Fantastic program. By far the best disk utility I have ever used. Buy it!
 
you can get stablebit drive scanner for free via their social media. I've gotten 2 copies of drive scanner and 1 copy of stable bit drivepool all for free
 
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Will this software scan an entire HDD for bad sectors and flag them, like the good old SpinRite?
From the product description it just sounds like a basic megaphone for SMART and a backup tool. I want a modern version of Spinrite. R.I.P.
 
fore1337 said:
Will this software scan an entire HDD for bad sectors and flag them, like the good old SpinRite?
From the product description it just sounds like a basic megaphone for SMART and a backup tool. I want a modern version of Spinrite. R.I.P.
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yeah it does. stablebit drive scanner does as well
 
One of my WD drives shit the bed even though HD Sentinel gave zero indication that it was going to fail, but I guess that kind of thing is unavoidable. I do wish there was a major GUI update, though; the program looks like it's stuck in the early '00s.
 
i love this im actually using this in place of stablebit on my drivepool as stablebit cannot see through the HBA's to my drives
 
mls1995 said:
you can get stablebit drive scanner for free via their social media. I've gotten 2 copies of drive scanner and 1 copy of stable bit drivepool all for free
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Do you have a link to the free drivepool/scanner offers?
 
You know, Windows (Vista/7/8/8.1/10) does this already with S.M.A.R.T. - this software doesn't do anything new the operating system doesn't already have as a native function. But S.M.A.R.T. isn't to be trusted either in my opinion since I have a shoebox full of Western Digital drives that have clear S.M.A.R.T. status but they're all basically dead and useless and won't pass WD's own diagnostic, go figure. This software is just pulling routines from Windows and providing the same data overall.

But it's your money, folks, have at it. :)
 
So I'm not seeing the discounted price - is there a promo code that isn't listed?
 
Destruya said:
So I'm not seeing the discounted price - is there a promo code that isn't listed?
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Its an in windows popup.

"Discounted price: EUR 12.60 / USD 13.48

(retail price: EUR 28 / USD 29.95)"
 
Tiberian said:
You know, Windows (Vista/7/8/8.1/10) does this already with S.M.A.R.T. - this software doesn't do anything new the operating system doesn't already have as a native function. But S.M.A.R.T. isn't to be trusted either in my opinion since I have a shoebox full of Western Digital drives that have clear S.M.A.R.T. status but they're all basically dead and useless and won't pass WD's own diagnostic, go figure. This software is just pulling routines from Windows and providing the same data overall.

But it's your money, folks, have at it. :)
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That's sad, because Smart is practically useless for me. Most of the time I see nothing until the drive is dead or about at least already losing data. My gut says this is more like WD Lifeguard tools, accept that it runs in the automatically in the background
 
nilepez said:
Do you have a link to the free drivepool/scanner offers?
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yeah they give away 1 copy of each stablebit product each week on twitter. It's NOT hard, I've won 3 times and I've only entered the contest 5 times total. And it's top-flight software too, super happy with it.
 
mls1995 said:
yeah they give away 1 copy of each stablebit product each week on twitter. It's NOT hard, I've won 3 times and I've only entered the contest 5 times total. And it's top-flight software too, super happy with it.
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thanks...will have to follow them.
 
Picked it up...have been using HDDTune and/or the Seagate utility for testing but maybe this is better.
 
MavericK96 said:
Picked it up...have been using HDDTune and/or the Seagate utility for testing but maybe this is better.
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its a great programs because it logs and graphs everything for you and just makes things simpler. Also it breaks some stuff down barney style too if your not full up to speed on all this
 
Yeah I played around with it a bit, looks pretty nice...especially would be nice if you wanted to monitor a bunch of drives in a server or something.
 
MavericK96 said:
Yeah I played around with it a bit, looks pretty nice...especially would be nice if you wanted to monitor a bunch of drives in a server or something.
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yep, got it specifically for my NAS (14-16 HDD) and main rig where i got 4 ish HDDs.

A lot of people recommend doing a burn in with the program of any HDDs you get. Do a surface test that read/writes 2 times and if nothing bad happens the drive should be good.

So far 14 3 TB Toshiba passed with no issue.
 
The best tool for doing a hard drive diagnostic is the one from the manufacturer of the hard drive, seriously - no third party tool will ever be as useful as that tool from the maker of the drive itself. If you have intentions of doing some kind of warranty return issue that's the first thing they'll ask you to do: use their diagnostic tool to find out what state the drive is in and provide them with the results before they'll typically approve an RMA - that is if the drive is functional enough to run the diagnostic of course.

I've seen people for a decade or two continue to use tools like this one featured in this thread, or HDTune, or other simplistic ones but they cannot ever replace the manufacturer's diagnostic to know what's really going on with a particular hard drive.
 
Tiberian said:
The best tool for doing a hard drive diagnostic is the one from the manufacturer of the hard drive, seriously - no third party tool will ever be as useful as that tool from the maker of the drive itself. If you have intentions of doing some kind of warranty return issue that's the first thing they'll ask you to do: use their diagnostic tool to find out what state the drive is in and provide them with the results before they'll typically approve an RMA - that is if the drive is functional enough to run the diagnostic of course.

I've seen people for a decade or two continue to use tools like this one featured in this thread, or HDTune, or other simplistic ones but they cannot ever replace the manufacturer's diagnostic to know what's really going on with a particular hard drive.
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Sure, but aren't these more for constant monitoring? Lifeguard tools are great, but AFAIK, you have to manually run them an in a server with lots of drives, that doesn't seem very practical. Am I wrong?
 
No, you're not wrong, but as I stated: if S.M.A.R.T. detects an issue it basically gets flagged to the OS level and Windows (since that's what most of you are using based on the fact that this thread is about a piece of Windows software) alerts you to the issue(s) so, either way you're made aware of something amiss.

I suppose some options with third party software like being able to get some kind of external notification is nice like having it email or even send a text message to alert you of problems if and when they occur is worth a few bucks, sure, that's a positive thing overall.

If you're using Windows and a hard drive issue crops up, S.M.A.R.T. pings the OS, the OS pings the end user, and so you're notified either way, just no chance of sending alerts and notifications any further than the Desktop of the machine in question or potentially a server by remote Desktop as well.

If people find the software useful for said purposes, great, but it's not a good product for actual diagnostic purposes - it's just polling the S.M.A.R.T. circuitry on the drive controller, nothing more.
 
Tiberian said:
The best tool for doing a hard drive diagnostic is the one from the manufacturer of the hard drive, seriously - no third party tool will ever be as useful as that tool from the maker of the drive itself. If you have intentions of doing some kind of warranty return issue that's the first thing they'll ask you to do: use their diagnostic tool to find out what state the drive is in and provide them with the results before they'll typically approve an RMA - that is if the drive is functional enough to run the diagnostic of course.

I've seen people for a decade or two continue to use tools like this one featured in this thread, or HDTune, or other simplistic ones but they cannot ever replace the manufacturer's diagnostic to know what's really going on with a particular hard drive.
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I would have agreed with you until I saw SeaTools pass a Seagate drive that HDDTune failed. I think that most of the manufacturer utilities don't do a complete surface scan so they aren't quite as comprehensive as other tools.
 
I'll toss this out there just because I know from first-hand experience that it happens: if you're not using a legit copy of HDTune it will throw up errors that don't actually exist and leave you believing a drive has issues. I'm not pointing a finger at anyone in this thread or anywhere else, I'm simply stating that if the copy or version of HDTune in use isn't a legitimate one purchased and registered from that company meaning a hacked/cracked/patched version or it's a trial version used past the trial period, it will randomly throw up errors on the error scan that do not actually exist and show S.M.A.R.T. status issues that don't exist either.

I trust it for benchmarking, but not much else, especially with respect to S.M.A.R.T. status or error checking and even surface scans. I actually did buy a license a few years ago for HDTune after noting such behavior after re-checking with a variety of tools both in and out of Windows, some directly off a bootable CD so no operating system got in the way at all, MHDD being one of the best - we all have skeletons, etc.

For the record, a lot of software that is pirated relatively easy does this, HDTune is far from the first or the last to provide bogus testing results because of tampering.
 
MavericK96 said:
I would have agreed with you until I saw SeaTools pass a Seagate drive that HDDTune failed. I think that most of the manufacturer utilities don't do a complete surface scan so they aren't quite as comprehensive as other tools.
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Not sure about Seatools, but Lifeguard does a complete scan if you want to do it, but doing so will take hours. I assume that Sentinel does that in the background and sends a notification if a problem is found. If that's the case, I think it's useful. If all it does is what Tiberian says, then I think it's kinda pointless.
 
I have run windows for ages and i have never gotten any notification from windows about a bad drive but HD Sentinel has notified me several times and i had a drive with 1K bad sectors and growing with aother 1K pending....obviously dying. Windows didn't give one shit even with it dropping in and out of device manager. I can set custom settings to get notified on temp changes, bad/relocation , pending, and everything else with this program. It allows me to keep a close eye and see a history of relocated or pending or anything. It would be a pain in the ass to log and monitor these settings with windows or manufacture crap software.

the barney style logging and charting and graphing is amazing. I can also do advanced testing of drives at various stages.
 
fore1337 said:
Will this software scan an entire HDD for bad sectors and flag them, like the good old SpinRite?
From the product description it just sounds like a basic megaphone for SMART and a backup tool. I want a modern version of Spinrite. R.I.P.
Click to expand...

Did Gibson finally kill SpinRite?

Man, that was one true staple software package.
 
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