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Monitor your hard drive’s health and get customized warnings with Acronis Drive Monitor

June 25, 2012 By 8 Comments

Acronis Drive Monitor is a helpful utility that will warn you before your hard drive dies, and help you manage other aspects of your hard drive’s health. It’s free, exceptionally easy to use, and unobtrusive.

One of the few things in the world that is certain, to paraphrase the Acronis web site, is that your hard drive will eventually fail and/or crash. At one point or another this happens to all of us, the best of hard are and owners. Modern hard drives are certainly much more reliable and long lived than ever, but they still are not designed to run forever and eventually they need replacing.

Acronis Drive Monitor can help you put that day off for as long as possible by monitoring the health of your hard disks and letting you know before they are going to fail. This lets you take immediate action to backup any data you need to save from the drives as well as make plans to procure replacements.

Acronis Drive Monitor Screenshot1

The drives are monitored by a system called S.M.A.R.T. which most drives should be able to handle. For those that can’t, there are instructions in the online help files to use custom script to run the monitoring program on your drives. There are multiple options for alerts and how to let you know when a drive is in danger, and Acronis will also monitor the critical events on your system and keep a log of them you can peruse later. This can be especially handy to determine when a drive might start going bad and even help identify the specific cause of eventual failure if you know what you’re doing.

Acronis Screen 3

What is interesting about this software, compared with others similar tools, is that it offers a way to monitor your hard drives even if they do not support S.M.A.R.T, through a custom script. It is also remarkable simple and straightforward, and thus useful for beginners and experts alike.

Acronis Screen 5

The only real downside to Acronis Drive Monitor is that it wants to install extra software to backup your drives when you install it. This isn’t really a big deal and could actually be helpful to those that don’t already have a backup system, since Acronis is meant to help you avoid a catastrophe. I would recommend Acronis to anyone who has had their hard drive for more than a month, as it’s an excellent resource that costs nothing and can, in fact, help you save money and headaches by replacing your hard drives at optimal times instead of waiting until they have already failed and all your data was lost.

Until next time, my friends.

[Thanks to reader Pazer for the tip about this software]

Get Acronis Drive Monitor here.


 
 
 
B.C. Tietjens

B.C. Tietjens

Born and raised overseas in a military family, B.C. Tietjens visited and lived in many places all over the world. He has worked on a number of publications and enjoys writing for different audiences, on such diverse subjects as relationships, technology, prestidigitation, self-improvement, entertaining children, and biographical stories. He currently writes primarily for Freewaregenius and enjoys the heck out of it.
June 25, 2012
B.C. Tietjens
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  • Bob

    I was interested in trying this out, but Acronis requires your name AND EMAIL (of course!) in order to download the program. Makes me feel like a fish going for a little worm: the last thing I need is more spam in my inbox. So I opted out.

  • Jerry

    Anything created and distributed by Acronis will also come with a free lifetime subscription to their daily spam! I have tried a couple of their products and was unimpressed – even for free. Then the spam begins. Glad I maintain a special email for such crap. Still, I’d rather have a free trial for however long than to be spammed for life. Maybe others have had better luck with them, but personally, I won’t ever use any of their products.

    • Samer

      Dudes: have you every considered a temporary email account (there’s many such services on the internet), or easier still, setting up a disposable (permanent) gmail or other account just for the purposes of registration. There are dozens if not hundreds of free software titles that you forgo if this is going to be a deal breaker for you.

      And, moreover, Acronis is a respectable company, not some BS outfit trying to sell you Viagra.

  • http://www.computerproblemssolvedcheap.com Richard Steven Hack

    Not to mention that it is ridiculously easy in virtually every mail client to put in a filter to redirect spam from a known company to the junk or trash folder do you never even see it…

  • Bob

    Yes – I have done both of what you guys suggest re: spam. I have several ‘pure spam’ accounts, and I’ve tried the ‘once-only’ one as well. And I have spam filters set up in my email client.

    To me, it’s more a matter of … principle. If a company wants me to have and use their free software, then great (I doubt that I keep and use 1 out of 10 freebies that I try). But if they’re primarily harvesting emails – I opt out. Well, generally I opt out – it depends on the software being offered. My principles only take me so far. hahah And in this case, I decided that Acronis was offering a fairly meager piece of software for the privilege of hammering me with emails. It’s a lot like a ‘trade’ – I’ll give you this if you’ll give me that. I didn’t think this one was worth it, that’s all.

    And – I tend to agree with Jerry re: quality of product. I actually bought TrueImage and used it for years. Until I found a wonderful piece of freeware – Macrium Reflect. Better in every single respect, totally free, and no spamming whatsoever. For me, the perfect freebie.

    • Samer

      @ Bob: so, as a matter of principle you want to be able to use a free software title without giving the creators the privilege of sending you emails promoting their other products even though you can easily circumvent it.

      Well, if I put myself in their shoes for a moment I can report to you that it seems totally fair to me, and not too much to ask.

  • Doc

    I like the idea of this, but downloading an 18MB file for the purpose is just ridiculous. I’m using SpeedFan (2MB download), which also gives you a configurable tray icon to track your PC’s CPU temperature, fan speed, and SMART disk health in one tiny program.

  • Bob

    @ Samer: I wish all these ‘email gatherers’ played straight and fair … then I could agree with you. I’ve been receiving marketing emails for YEARS (no exaggeration at all) from some companies – and that definitely includes software vendors from whom I’ve purchased stuff, not just freebies. And one never knows – in advance – who’ll ‘abuse’ their access to your email account and dun you endlessly to buy their products … in fact, many don’t dun at all!

    You’re right in saying I could ‘…easily circumvent’ this problem. IF I was more disciplined in using my spam email accounts religiously. But over the past 10 or so years I’ve gotten it all bollixed up – now I have 5 email accounts, and have given out the ‘crapola’ accounts to some good places, and the ‘good’ accounts to some fishy places. Aaagh.

    Thus – my problem. And I promise – not another word on this from me. :-)