Hard Disk Sentinel Pro 5.2

“Better safe than sorry” could well be the motto of the new version of Hard Disk Sentinel Professional. No other utility will keep a closer look to your internal and external hard disks while using so few of your system resources. This program checks and monitors 24/7 all sensitive areas pertaining to your hard disks’ performance in order to diagnose – and thus prevent – any possible failure before it actually happens.

Hard Disk Sentinel Pro is not a tool to fix hard disk problems – it won’t recover your lost data if your HD dies or put your hard drive back to its pristine state if it fails to work properly. Actually, by using this program to its full potential, you won’t ever need to rely on any data or disk recovery software tool. By providing you with accurate real-time measurements of your hard disks’ temperature, data about your disk performance, S.M.A.R.T. readings, transfer speeds, and an alert system that will keep you informed at all times about the slightest anomaly detected on any of your HDDs.

As soon as you install the program and open it, you’re provided with the most comprehensive information about the health of all your connected HDDs, regardless of their type. External USB Flash disks may require you to perform an ad-hoc test in order to gather some information about them, unlike with standard HDDs, SSDs, and eMMC drives. The tool provides you with HD hardware and software tests, seek noise tests, short and extended self-tests, as well as random seek tests and surface tests to check the integrity of your drives. Self-tests can be performed in one or in all your connected drives in one single operation. The results will be available both on the program’s intuitive and comprehensive interface and as HTML and TXT reports that you can save and send via e-mail directly from the program.

Temperature and disk performance are measured in real time at all times, and you can check their status just by clicking on the corresponding tab in the program’s main interface. The Alerts tab will display any event that may lead to an eventual disk failure. Alerts can be configured to produce a sound and to send or display a message whenever certain thresholds are crossed, and even force your PC or laptop to back up your sensitive data (even to a LAN server or a remote server via FTP) and/or shut down whenever one of the worst-case scenarios occurs.

Though perfectly suitable for the standard home user, this professional edition comes – as expected – with tools to make life easier to developers and system managers. Thus, they will find an API interface that they can query in search of specific data about your hard disks. They will also benefit from a portable version, data destruction tools, disc burning with Nero, WinRAR and 7-ZIP file compression, file transfer via FTP, WMI/XML status for developers, or a useful Panic Backup feature in case of failure. None of these features are present in the Standard edition, though this includes all the tests, reports, and alerts required to protect your computer from HD failures. The Enterprise edition comes with remote monitoring capabilities, which will let you find about your monitored disks using a Web browser in a variety of devices.

Hard Disk Sentinel Professional is the perfect substitute to traditional HD data recovery tools. It will not only keep you informed about the current status of all your disks but will alert you whenever a risk of failure is detected and will back up your most sensitive data before it happens.