The main window with the information about the disk. The overall general state of its health is shown together with the percentage of the remaining life and performance rate. If you have several hard drives, you can switch among them using the tabs at the top of the window.
This sample screenshot shows the situation when the state of health is not good and the life of the disk is in danger. In this case, we recommend that you keep HDDlife® constantly running in the background mode and monitoring the state of the disk automatically at least once every half an hour. And you must not forget to back up your data regularly.
In this screenshot you can see an example of how HDDlife® works if it detects that the life and the health of a disk is at the critical level. It is recommended that you back up all your data immediately and to replace your hard drive as soon as possible.
Currently, USB hard drives are getting more and more popular. Speed, availability, ease of use, large amounts of information – all that takes you to a new level of mobile freedom and functionality. One of the new features in HDDlife® version 3.0 allows you to control the performance of external drives, now the program supports USB. Now the program can work with drives from the largest Japanese IO-Data company and with Western Digital Passport drives.
Detailed SMART report.
With the suggestions of professional users taken into account, HDDlife® 3.0 now has a new feature – detailed SMART information, which allows you to view detailed information about attributes. SMART monitors the main characteristics of the drive showing them in the form of numbers.
Power and Accoustic management
Hard drive overheating due to the increase in the power it consumes is a serious problem, especially for those who use portable computers – laptops. The AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) technology found in all modern hard drives allows adjusting your disk's noise levels, but there's no way to access it from Windows - except HDDlife®! If your computer sits in a bedroom, you'll certainly appreciate the ability to easily silence your hard drives by enabling a silent mode without sacrificing too much performance. HDDlife® allows you to fine-tune your disk's noise level and adjust noise vs. performance the way you like.
AnywhereView™ - monitoring the health of hard drives in any program.
The icon representing their health is displayed directly on the icons of the hard drives in all programs on your computer - from the My Computer window with the list of drives and to the "Open File" dialog box of any program - Word, Notepad, etc. You will never forget about the health of your hard drives and about the safety of your data!
All-in-One - All HDDlife® features in one screenshot!
Questions about the indicators of health/performance (in percent)
HDDlife® showed 70% health a week ago, 40% two days ago, and today it's 70% again. Is something wrong with the program? It's a quite normal situation. The problem is that the self-diagnostic indicators of a hard drive, which HDDlife® uses to estimate its health, can get not only worse, but also better. In this case, the health increases.
I bought a new disk and HDDlife® shows only 60% health. What's the matter? Should I go and change the disk? If the overall health indicator shows that everything is OK, there's nothing to worry about. Even if HDDlife® shows the red state of health and recommends that you immediately replace the drive, the manufacturer's policy of replacing hard drives is applied only to those hard rives that are already out of order.
General questions
How is it possible to forecast a hard drive failure anyway?
HDDlife® uses the S.M.A.R.T. (SMART) technology. It is a special hard drive self-diagnostic system that constantly analyses the state of the disk during its operation and uses more than 20 various parameters to report its state. In turn, HDDlife® tests all these technical parameters and displays the results in a comprehensible way.
More details about the S.M.A.R.T. technology are available here.
Can I install the new version over the old one or should I uninstall the old version first? You can install it over the old version. All HDDlife® versions can uninstall automatically.
HDDlife® does not show the hard drive mounted as secondary/slave?
For unknown reasons, it is impossible to get the self-diagnostic data (SMART) from a hard drive that it is mounted like this. No software available on the market works with this configuration.
What temperature is normal for my hard drive?
We recommend that you avoid exceeding the working temperature of 40°C for usual hard drives and 45-50°C for laptops. However, short-term high temperatures (for instance, during disk defragmentation) are permissible.
Why doesn't HDDlife® work on my computer? Instead, it displays the message that no disks are found.
First, make sure that you use the latest drivers for your system. We encountered compatibility problems with the following drivers:
Intel Application Accelerator,
nVidia nForce platform drivers, and
VIA 4-in-1.
But, all these problems are fixed in the latest versions of the drivers. To be safe, download the most recent version from the manufacturer's site and install it. HDDlife® supports only IDE and Serial ATA disks, but does not support RAID disks.
Why does HDDlife® display the message that no hard drives are found when I start it on my system? I have a Serial ATA disk that is said to be supported by your program. Probably, you use RAID features for these disks, in which case HDDlife® will not work. If you use an external controller instead of the one integrated in the chipset, it is impossible for the program to work with such disks. For example, in the case of motherboards for Intel processors the program can normally work with Serial ATA only beginning from chipset i865.
Does HDDlife® need administrator permissions to work?
Yes, HDDlife® 2.x works only under user with administrator permissions on the computer.
Why doesn't HDDlife® monitor my USB disks?
Unfortunately, not all controllers of USB hard drives support S.M.A.R.T. commands so it is impossible to determine the state of health for such disks. List of supported by HDDlife® USB disks you can find here. Also, you can use trial version to check, does it show tab with info for your USB drive if it not present in this list.
Why does HDDlife® try to send something to the Internet every hour?
What does "Send statistics of changes in attributes" mean in the settings? What data is sent and what is its size?
Starting from version 2.9, a new system of analyzing changes in SMART attributes was introduced in HDDlife. It makes allows us to accumulate information about all kinds of hard drives on our statistics server in order to estimate the health status of your hard drives taking into account similar models of other users. Besides, in future we are going to provide users with access to this data right from the HDDlife® interface (for example, for you to see the average temperature of drives similar to yours, etc.).
The data being sent contains only technical information about hard drive parameters, no personal data or other personally identifiable information is sent.
The data being sent is highly compressed so its size is minimal - literally, a couple of kilobytes. Besides, it is outgoing data and the outgoing traffic of a regular user is much less than his incoming traffic, so sending statistics will not influence the size of the traffic considerably.
