HDDlife
Reviewed January, 2008
What’s It Do?
HDD Life reads data from hard drives and displays disks' health,
temperature, resources, and free space. Also fine-tunes disks' noise level
and adjusts noise vs. performance in reducing power consumption.
Does it do what it Promises?
Reviewer 1:
Yes. This application pulls all the available S.M.A.R.T. information
from your up to 32 hard drives and displays it in an easy to view and
access form. HDDLife comes in two versions. One is for desktop platforms
and one is for the special needs of notebooks. The notebook version
adjusts for typically higher HDD temperatures in notebooks and the “power
saver” schemes that these devices often use to lengthen battery life. If a
program is set to “check” the parameters frequently, it can “wake up” the
system while it is in a power saving “sleep” mode thus greatly diminishing
the life of your battery. HDDLife Pro for Notebooks allows for this by
detecting different power schemes and not waking up the notebook.
Reviewer 2:
HDDlife Pro promises to monitor the health of the hard drives on my
desktop and my laptop, and as far as I can tell, it does so. It monitors a
number of aspects, among them temperature, “life status,” and free space,
and it will warn me if any of its readings indicates a problem. Since
HDDlife consistently gave both my desktop and my laptop drives “excellent”
ratings, I had no opportunity to test the program’s warnings.
Reviewer 3:
HDDlife Pro reads the SMART data from the hard drive(s) and converts
it into accessible and useful information. Left unaltered, the SMART data
is a continuously updated record of the use and health of your hard drive,
but this information is not accessible to the computer user who needs it
the most. Of what use is a silent warning when you are at high risk for
losing data? HDDlife changes that by actively monitoring this SMART data,
making it available in reports, and popping up warnings when critical
errors occur.
Reviewer 4:
Yes, the program does monitor all the drives installed on my computer.
Recent releases have started to add support for USB-connected drives as
well. HDDlife will recognize the USB drives on my computer when I turn
them on -- usually I have them turned off, as I use them specifically for
backups and disk images of my "active" drives. However, apart from listing
them on the bottom of the main window (please see below), the program does
not show any "S.M.A.R.T." information for the USB drives. I also installed
the program on my laptop Unfortunately the hard disk (an unnamed generic
drive, I guess, of Dell origin) provides no SMART information at all, so I
was unable to use the notebook version of the program.
Reviewer 5:
Yes. Both HDDlife Pro and HDDlife for Notebooks are disk management
programs that run in the system tray and continually monitor the health
and temperature values of any or all hard drives that support S.M.A.R.T
technology (and most hard drives built in the past seven or eight years
do), and alerts the user in the event of problems—both real and potential.
Was it easy to install?
Reviewer 1:
Yes, very easy, with no problems at all. I actually did it while
waiting for an appointment, with an Ev-DO card on my Tablet computer. The
installed size was a tiny 5.5 MB on my desktop and a slightly larger 5.8
MB on the Tablet I installed it on.
Reviewer 2:
On my desktop computer, installation was easy, though installing an
upgrade wiped out all my option settings. Also, the set-up information
claims that you can “see the list of supported and unsupported drives on
our site at:
. “ There is just a blank space rather than a link to the site. This is
true even with the upgrade. On my laptop, the installation process was
more cumbersome. I couldn’t simply use the registration key originally
supplied. Instead, I had to use that key to go through several extra steps
to obtain and enter an activation code.
Reviewer 4:
Yes. With a cable connection to the Internet, it was a quick download
(six megabytes). It is a standard Windows installation, and it went
quickly and easily. I could put the program in the folder of my choice;
however, I would also like the choice of placing the icons and shortcuts
where I would like.
Reviewer 5:
No. Each program is an average size download, 6.02MB and 4.53MB
respectively, but it took me several attempts to activate the product. On
attempting to open the setup files I would repeatedly get error messages.
Each time I would do a complete uninstall as well as clean the registry of
any remnants (and there were many, many!) before retrying. It took three
attempts to install the program on my PC and two times before it installed
on the notebook. Support was non-existent (see below).
Good Points?
Reviewer 1:
While all this information is available from other sources if you dig
around in the innards of your operating system , this puts it all in one
place in an easy to read form. It defaults to running in the background
and continuously monitoring the health of any HDDs connected and running.
It does not appear to impact the resources of the computer it is running
on in any significant way. It provides some interesting information that
one would not normally look at. For instance, my desktop HDD has been
running for three years, 7 months, 27 days and 8 hours at the time of this
writing and, at that age, may need replacing soon. HDDLife not only
monitors the drive health but can be set to deliver warnings about HDD
health, temperature and disc space. These warning levels are user
selectable and can be via pop-ups, an email, via network to another
computer and/or a .wav sound. Frequency of checks can be set from every 1
to 999 minutes. Free space warnings can be user set to a percentage of
choosing. Both “urgent” and “critical” levels are selectable. The user
interface is clean and clear. It installs two system tray icons: one for
the main page showing all the various information and the other a
“read/write” monitor for the monitored HDDs. HDDLife Pro can be set to
deliver its information in 20+ languages.
Reviewer 2: Through its use of SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and
Reporting Technology) built into most modern hard drives, HDDlife Pro
provides very useful information about the state of a computer’s hard
drive(s). Being warned ahead of time that some aspects of a hard drive are
failing gives the user time (and incentive) to back up all important files
and arrange to have the hard drive repaired or replaced. HDDlife
identifies specific problems that can help in making informed decisions
about how to proceed. In my case, I found it reassuring to know that my
computers’ hard drives were in very good shape, and that they didn’t run
at too high a temperature even under heavy use. I was also pleased that
HDDlife is able to provide an assessment of the hard drive almost
instantly, as opposed to having first to do a time-consuming surface scan.
HDDlife makes available a freeware version of the program. This version
doesn’t provide the kind of detailed information that the Pro version
does, but for people on a tight budget who want to monitor the health of
their hard drives, the freeware version may be useful. Another good point
of HDDlife is that it offers a separate program for laptops that takes
into account the features peculiar to laptops, such as the fact that the
temperature in a laptop tends to be higher than that in a desktop, and as
a result, HDDlife avoids issuing false alarms. HDDlife might prove
especially valuable to a system administrator in charge of multiple
computers.
Reviewer 3: HDDlife’s interface is simple and easy to understand.
Unless a drive error occurs, an optional tray icon is the only visible
sign that HDDlife is running. Clicking on this icon brings up a clear
graphical interface that shows the temperature, health status, performance
and characteristics of the hard drive(s) and partition(s). It tells how
long the drive has been in service how much capacity and free space each
of your drives and partitions has. If you know the fine details of the
drive’s performance, one can click on the “more info” links under health
or performance. There will be found more detail than most users would
understand or need about how their hard drive has been performing over its
life; however, it is the type of information that would be useful to
diagnose a questionable hard drive. In my case, I have some of my
partitions filled to near capacity. As soon as HDD detected this it popped
up a small but quite visible warning window telling me of this condition
which could result in loss of data should I try to write to this
partition. Warnings can be visual, audible, sent over a network, or sent
via e-mail. There is even the capacity to shut down the computer should
the hard drive reach a critical (customizable) temperature.
Reviewer 4: The user interface is well-designed, and gives quite a lot
of information in an easy-to-read manner. At the bottom of the screen, all
drives are listed, with the Drive number (C:\ E:\ etc.), the label given
it, its total capacity and the amount of free space left (with a little
bar graph).
The top screen shows a set of tabs of the
drives that the program is monitoring. One of the drives is highlighted.
Displayed are its temperature, its Health Status (given as a %) and its
Performance (as a %) and its "work time" (years, days, months and hours).
A small box gives a summary such as: ALL RIGHT! The reliability and
performance of your hard drive are completely all right. But do not forget
to back up your data at least once a week since nobody is protected
against bad luck.
Clicking in the links brings up a screen
showing the S.M.A.R.T. data. This is pretty technical stuff, and may not
mean too much. But scrolling through each of the individual "SMART" items,
shows a brief description of the meaning of that item, and what it tells
about the drive appears in a box below. Beside each item is an icon which
identifies each of the "attributes" as a Health Attribute, a Performance
Attribute, a Health and Performance Attribute or an Information Attribute.
In order to avoid overwhelming those of us who know very little about the
technicalities of hard drives (the majority of us, I suspect) there is
really quite a lot of useful information provided in an understandable
manner. In the options, one can specify the way the information is to be
provided in the system tray icon(s) or have the program change the icons
beside the drive letters in "My Computer", the listing of drives on your
network, in some of the dialog boxes of different applications, etc. The
program can print a log of drive analyses (useful to take to a repair
shop). The program can also be run in 26 different languages -- although
the help file seemed to be available only in English -- perhaps because I
installed the program in English.
Reviewer 5: If you have ever been concerned about what might happen if
your hard drive failed, I would suggest two things: (1) Backup all of your
important data, and (2) use some type of hard drive monitoring program
such as HDDlife. HDDlife Pro and HDDlife Notebook provide all of the tools
needed to keep abreast of any potential or immediate problems that could
affect the health of a hard drive. It sits in the system tray constantly
monitoring the hard drive(s) as to temperature, overall health, disc free
space, and the age of the drive. If a particular hard drive exceeds
certain preset values and are at risk, both programs will alert in a
variety of ways from an email or network alert, playing an audible alert,
to even shutting down the computer. It offers limited support for USB
drives, as well as external hard drives manufactured by Western Digital
and IO-Data. It supports all other hard drive configurations including
IDE, Serial ATA, SCSI but does not, unfortunately, work with RAID
configurations. Both programs worked well and integrated smoothly with
Windows using very few resources (1% CPU and 1.7MB Ram). The GUI (Graphic
User Interface) is attractive, well laid out, intuitive, and easy to
understand. (see screenshot below from the HDDlife Web site).
In fact, if it were not for the support issues
discussed below, I would have been happy to have recommended this product
as it is actually quite excellent overall once it is up and running. It is
also now certified Vista compatible and is so listed on the Microsoft
Vista website.
Weak Points.
BinarySense, Inc., developers of HDDlife,
commented: It is important to note that HDDlife works with hard drives
almost on a direct level, using the hardware drivers provided by the
manufacturers of the hardware. Unfortunately, not all drivers, even those
with the Microsoft WHQL logo, supports commands for hard drive health
monitoring. Also, some drivers claim that they support some functions (for
example, noise/performance level setting) when in fact they don’t. So,
when HDDlife starts, using those drivers, and requests information about
hard drives it receives erroneous reports that all is OK. HDDlife’s
commands to the hard drive are ignored since the drivers do not allow
them.
Reviewer 1:
I did get an anomalous error a few times, an “overheat warning” with
accompanying siren sound effect alerting me that the HDD was running at
231 degrees! Were this true, I am sure the system would have shut down.
Upon actual check of the main screen, the HDD was only 81 degrees. While
the system requirements are minimal for use, there is an issue as far as
SCSI and RAID. Due to this, I would not be able to use it on my gaming
machine since it has a RAID array.
Additionally, I’m not overly fond of yet another program in the system
tray. The offset is to just set it to not start every time and do a scan
as part of a regular system maintenance along with the backups, AV and SW
scans and defrag that should be done on a regular basis.
Reviewer 2:
The most serious weakness I encountered was that HDDlife interfered
with my attempts to create an image of my hard drive for backup purposes
using an external hard drive. I kept getting error messages about poor
media. Finally, I shut down HDDlife and tried again; this time, I was able
to create the backup image with no problem. At times, too, I had the
impression that HDDlife might be causing a slowdown on my computer as some
page loading seemed rather slow until I shut down HDDlife. Though
HDDlife’s negative effect on performance was its most serious weakness, I
encountered lesser problems as well. The Automatic Acoustic Management
feature is supposed to enable the user to decide whether the computer
should run slower and quieter or faster and noisier. However, though there
is a slide that ostensibly controls this, any time I tried to set it to be
a bit faster and noisier, the slide immediately returned to the slower and
quieter default position. Turning off this feature didn’t help, since then
the slide could not be moved at all. I’m question why the program bothers
to have a slide if it can’t be adjusted. I tried to find information about
this in the program’s Help file, but I could find no entries for either
“acoustic” or “automatic acoustic management.” Also, when I clicked on a
link in the Help file to learn more about S.M.A.R.T. technology, it
brought up a page in Internet Explorer (which I don’t like to use) rather
than my default browser, Firefox. Another weakness concerns upgrades.
HDDlife is supposed to notify the user when an update is available. I
didn’t receive such notification, perhaps because for a while I stopped
the program from running at startup. Still, I would have expected that
once I again arranged to have the program run at startup, I would receive
notification of any available upgrades. That didn’t happen, nor was there
any link on the interface that would allow me to check for upgrades. I
learned about an upgrade only by browsing on the company’s Web site. And
while I was able to download and install the upgrade, I’d have appreciated
some information about whether or not I could simply install it over the
earlier version. I did install it that way, and all went well, except that
all my option settings were lost. Indeed, each time the program is
installed (even if the version is the same), it seems to revert back to
the default option settings, even though it does recognize that the
program is fully registered. Another relatively minor weakness is the
default color used for displaying the hard drive’s temperature—a light
green that I found all but unreadable. Admittedly, it is easy to change
this in the options, but it seems strange that the company would choose as
its default a color that is so difficult to see. Also, regarding the
display, I didn’t see much use for the hard drive usage icon. It takes up
valuable space in the system tray but simply tells me the current read and
write statistics for the hard drive. I found no information about this in
the Help file. Indeed, the Help file’s discussion of the options under the
Visual tab didn’t even indicate that there was an option to show a hard
drive usage icon, and a search of the Help file turned up nothing. I
removed the icon. One other aspect of HDDlife Pro that I didn’t like was
the frequency with which it calls home or is contacted by the company.
Every time I started or rebooted my computer, the program would call home,
often more than once. It also did so at other times during the day.
BinarySense, Inc., developers of HDDlife,
commented: Regarding disk image backups, we test with Acronis TrueImage
and found no problems. All other comments are very useful and we plan to
fix these problems in the next minor update. Regarding the “call home”
feature, this is the “report hdd life statistic feature” that is described
during installation. It can be turned off in the HDDlife options.
Reviewer 3:
There are limitations on the drive types and configurations that
HDDlife can analyze. For example, I was hoping to use HDDlife on my office
desktop; but since I have a RAID drive configuration, I was unable to use
it there. It is also unable to check the status of my external MyBook USB
hard drive. According to the Web site, some USB drives are supported and
others aren’t, but they are working on adding more supported USB drives. I
have some of these partitions intentionally filled to near their maximum
capability. HDDlife gave me appropriate warnings that these partitions
were nearly filled, but I found it impossible to turn these warnings off
without disabling the hard drive overcapacity warning for ALL of the
drives/partitions on my system. It would be a nice modification if the
warning settings were customizable by the individual drive/partition.
BinarySense, Inc., developers of HDDlife,
commented: Unfortunately, the current HHDlife structure doesn’t allow
individual settings; but, we plan to add them in the next major revision
(4.x).
Reviewer 4:
Generally I have found HDD Life to perform as advertised, but HDD Life
developers need to improve the turn-around time in responding to ticket
requests for support. I sent in several requests from quite technical to
quite naive. The first request was not answered for a couple of weeks.
When it was, the answer dealt with the problem, although without any
explanation, and only a brief "sorry for the delay" comment. If the issue
was one which needed more time for resolution, simply an answer saying, "Thank
you for pointing out the problem. We are working on a solution and will
get back to you as soon as we can" would have been better than a
fairly long delay with no acknowledgement at all. All the other questions
were answered within two or three days. Again, they all dealt with the
questions efficiently. A consistent and more rapid response time to the
tickets would provide users and potential users with a greater sense of
confidence in the program.
BinarySense, Inc., developers of HDDlife,
commented: Yes, sometimes support is our problem. Currently, we are
planning to restructure it.
Reviewer 5:
There are really only a few somewhat minor and, I would think, easily
correctable weaknesses in the program. I would like to see temperatures
displayed in Fahrenheit as well as Celsius but this is more of a
convenience factor only. I would like to see both programs allow the user
to determine a set point for the temperature other than the preset 40C.
The notebook I was using ran normally at a bit higher temperature thus
plaguing me with continuous notifications which, if one were to walk away
from the computer for a time, would accumulate and require closing each
one individually—something that was time consuming and aggravating. I was
at first alarmed that I was getting High Alerts from my firewall
indicating that both programs were attempting to “phone home”
notwithstanding that I had disabled the automatic update feature. I
discovered that this is a feature of the programs in which they report
statistics about one’s hard drive to some data base for further use, and
this function can be disabled through File|Options|Statistics. This should
be made a bit clearer as the uninitiated might simply panic and uninstall
the program. What is not a minor problem is support. While support is free
there is no standard email technical support. In order to access support
either via direct technical support, the Knowledge Base, etc, one must
first register. I was not happy with providing personal information such
as home address, telephone numbers, and so on, but did so to test what I
believe to be the deal maker/breaker for software. I went through the
lengthy and tedious registration process; waited for the confirming email
to be sent along with a code necessary to complete the registration;
entered the code and was immediately taken to the log in page. When
attempting to log in I would simply receive a notice that I needed to
register—which, of course, I had just done. I tried repeatedly with
different email addresses and different names, using the automatic rather
than the manual method, but all to no avail. Unfortunately, without any
way of evaluating the nature or quality of the support for this product, I
can not recommend it.
BinarySense, Inc., developers of HDDlife,
commented: I’m not sure I understand the problem with the 40C present. If
this is a setting for the high warning temperature, it can be changed from
the File>Options menu. As for problems with support, we plan to change the
ticket system to something more user friendly.
It is important to note that HDDlife works with hard drives almost on a
direct level, using the hardware drivers provided by the manufacturers of
the hardware. Unfortunately, not all drivers, even those with the
Microsoft WHQL logo, supports commands for hard drive health monitoring.
Also, some drivers claim that they support some functions (for example,
noise/performance level setting) when in fact they don’t. So, when HDDlife
starts, using those drivers, and requests information about hard drives it
receives erroneous reports that all is OK. HDDlife’s commands to the hard
drive are ignored since the drivers do not allow them.
Other Comments?
Reviewer 1: I found this to be a useful utility application that is
very flexible and has a small footprint and little system impact.
Reviewer 2: One puzzling aspect of HDDlife Pro manifested itself
when I uninstalled the program. After the program was removed, WinPatrol
popped up to inform me that a new auto startup program had been detected
that has been added to the startup folder and will run each time I log in
or restart my computer. The program was a file from Binary Sense’s
Config.Msi subdirectory (Binary Sense is the company that makes HDDlife).
At first, I assumed this was a fluke, but a day or so later I uninstalled
the program again, and the same WinPatrol warning appeared. The only
difference was in the name of the file. The first time it was
C:\Config.Msi\272d44b.rbf, while the second time the number changed to
63da8.rbf. Apparently .rbf files are used in the Windows Installer
rollback process, but from what I’ve read these are deleted when the
installation completes successfully. Hence, I have no idea why they
triggered WinPatrol as soon as I uninstalled HDDlife.
BinarySense, Inc., developers of HDDlife,
commented: This is some kind of Windows Installer failure. HDDlife does
not leave any files on the computer after uninstallation. It may have been
that some files were in use and, if so, these files will be deleted after
reboot.
Reviewer 3: Other than the overcapacity issue, I received no other
warnings during my months of use. The “HDDlife for Notebooks” version
contains all of the features of HDDlife plus options for power and
acoustic management. Since my drive is not noisy, I adjusted the acoustic
setting for maximum performance. I was less sure about how to set the
power management slider. It would be a nice addition if there was a link
from the setting window to explain what tradeoffs are being made in
choosing power savings versus performance. At the time of review, there is
an alternative to paying cash for HDDlife: Purchasing or subscribing to a
partnered product or service provides HDDlife for free.
Reviewer 4: Unlike most other programs that monitor the SMART
status and general drive health, HDDlife claims that it can also monitor
drives that are connected to one’s computer via an USB port. Although the
program does list my USB drives, it does not provide any SMART data. I
asked the developers about this, and they responded that they have a list
on the Web site of drives that are currently supported. Unfortunately,
mine are not included in the list, so I was not able to test this function
myself. However, for those who may be interested, the HDD life people do
offer an interesting exchange of a license for an empty untested USB drive
enclosure. Details can be found at
http://tinyurl.com/2afbgd. It may be worthwhile to look at some
information on the Internet about the "SMART" drive monitoring, for
example Wikipedia at
http://tinyurl.com/n2lfk. I looked at some other programs (as I
did have a SMART monitoring program on my Win 98 computer, several eons
ago). I found HDD life to be as complete as any of the others I looked at,
as well as having an easier-to-use interface.
BinarySense, Inc., developers of HDDlife,
commented: The offer to exchange the license for an empty USB enclosure is
no longer available.
Reviewer 5: There are several disk management programs available
for download and while they can all be useful tools to a greater or lesser
extent, they are not a replacement for doing regular backups. I have seen
too many people get a false sense of security when these programs say all
is well, only to then have their hard drive fail without backups because
of the “clean bill of health.” These are only tools to help alert the user
as to the current health of his hard drive. Always do regular backups!
Will you continue to use it?
Reviewer 1: Yes, I’ve added it to my tool kit for weekly
maintenance.
Reviewer 2: I may run it from time to time just to check that all
is still well with my hard drives. I see no need to have HDDlife use
system resources to monitor my very healthy hard drives all the time.
Reviewer 3: Yes. Of all of the hazards a computer faces, the loss
of the data from a failed hard drive is one of the worst. HDDlife gives
the earliest warning possible when a hard drive is beginning to go bad;
but as they say on their report of a healthy drive: “do not forget to back
up your data … since nobody is protected against bad luck.”
Reviewer 4: Yes, I will leave it installed on my computer. But I
will only have it as a program that I will boot up once in a while, and
not as a utility that I have constantly running in the background.
Reviewer 5: Yes, but only with caution and for some very limited
uses. Until the temperature set point can be adjusted by the user, this
probably most important feature is of little value to me.
BinarySense, Inc., developers of HDDlife, commented: We want to say many
thanks to the Reviewers! We will try to fix as much as possible in the
next minor revisions and make HDDlife much more useful in the next major
revision, 4.x, sometime this summer 2008.
OPERATING SYSTEMS USED IN THIS
REVIEW
Windows XP Pro, XP Home
Back |