Two absolute must-haves to monitor Hard Disk health
HDD Regenerator and HD Tune, two awesome free utilities that will report on the performance and the health of your hard disks.
Recovering from an episode where one of my hard disks is almost crashing I encountered two fantastic programs that can tell you if your hard disks need replacing. I had published an earlier article about replacing your hard disks with SSDs where I had mentioned programs such as Hard Disk Sentinel and Speccy but the two I am going to write about are even better.
The first is HDD Regenerator from 2011 which also comes in an unregistered free version which is good enough to tell you if your hard disks need to be replaced. HDD Regenerator when run once opens with Windows on subsequent booting sessions and monitors your hard disks for their performance and warns you of the conditions of the disks. A brilliant piece of software! The registered version of HDD Regenerator can also fix bad disks. To know the status just click on SMART from the menu (right clicking the icon on your task bar) and instantly a report reveals the health of your disks. Here is what I got.
From the report one can easily see that the ST3500414CD hard disk (Seagate, extreme right) needs to be backed up and replaced as soon as possible. It’s status has been marked Red for “Bad”.The next vulnerable hard disk is the Hitachi one flagged yellow for status. Link to the downloadable version is at the bottom of this post.
The other program is HD Tune which is also free and is also available as part of the Hiren’s BootCD PE. HD Tune will take time to do a complete analysis of your hard disk and report all the bad blocks. For instance it took almost 154 minutes (a little over 2.5 hours) to do a complete scan of my 500 GB Seagate Hard Disk to come up with the following report.
Read the FAQ page from HD Tune recommending the course of action one needs to take based on the reports it generates after a scan of your hard disks.
