CrystalDiskInfo

A great hard disk monitoring application. I used it to more closely examine the S.M.A.R.T. status of a hard disk drive that I was informed was on the brink of failing. The Intel storage controller driver that informed me of this (RapidStorage for Enterprises) did so flawlessly, which I am immensely thankful for, but it did not give me any more information apart from the fact that the drive was "at risk".

You can get CrystalDiskInfo in a portable archive if you want, so you don't need to install anything. That's always a very important offering for anything related to drive health.

The interface is very clean and simple to use. You can instantly see where to find the information you need, even if you're not knowledgable about drives and their internals. Just click the drive you are interested in (any partitions/drive letters it holds are displayed to help you). A LED shows you at one glance if one drive reports critical S.M.A.R.T. information, i.e., thinks it's about to die.

Upon clicking a drive, you get all the basic information such as model and serial number, total size, firmware version, cache size, rotational speed, etc. You're also told what interface it uses (helps you make sure that, for example, a S-ATA II drive is not erroneously using S-ATA I in backwards-compatibility mode, which would make it slower than it needs to be), and what features are enabled (most notably, to make sure that an SSD has TRIM enabled, and a hard disk doesn't, which can otherwise be pretty hard to find out in Windows).

Most important are of course the diagnostics. You get a big display of your drive's overall status—a big blue 'good' or a big red 'bad'—its current operating temperature, how many times it has been turned on and how many hours it has been in operation (very interesting!) A listbox in the bottom shows the detailed S.M.A.R.T. information with their warning limits, so that you can find out exactly why the drive reports that it is going to fail, and whether you should take it seriously (you probably should). You can also export all this data for all the drives in your system into a handy text file, which includes the raw binary data from with the stats are extracted. A good snapshot if you need an expert's opinion.

There's more to the application still. You can have it start with your system and run discretely in the background, making its presence known only if it detects something bad happening. You can even let it install a Windows Gadget showing diagnostic information.

I will likely keep this tool around even though both Intel RapidStorage and Windows 7 itself informed me of the S.M.A.R.T. warnings, because the additional information and diagnostics it gives are both nerdily interesting and helpful.