Ashampoo HDD Control 3 3.20.00

Overview

HDD Control 2 is another great product from Ashampoo, this time giving you some help regarding your hard disks. It monitors all your hard drives for errors and gives you an overview of their statuses with useful information such as temperature and performance. It will let you know when a drive is about to fail so that you have time to prepare for it and backup your data. All kinds of drives are supported, regardless of connection (IDE, S-ATA, SSD etc.).

Installation

As soon as you launch the installer, a window will pop-up and ask you the desired installation language. Afterwards a window will open that will instruct you how to properly perform the installation. To view the program’s requirements, click on the “Show System Requirements” button located on the bottom left corner (it will open the appropriate webpage in your browser). After a few steps, you will be prompted to choose what kind of installation you want to perform; Complete or Custom. Complete will install the program with default settings and include MyAshampoo toolbar in the installation. It will also set MyAshampoo web search as the default search and homepage. To exclude any of these, pick Custom installation and make any changes you wish.

The program can run under Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 OS. Both 32 and 64-bit versions are supported.

Interface

It’s obvious that the program’s interface has been taken good care of. It is highly elegant and neat, just like any other Ashampoo product. At the top you can see some tabs: Monitoring, Defrag, Benchmark, Drive Cleaner, Internet Cleaner, Data Recovery, Analysis and Data Destruction. Each one changes the screen to show different options and functions. The main one is Monitoring, which has a lot of information about your hard drives and also provides you with many tools. The rest of the tabs have different purposes, and are equally as useful. At the bottom part of the window is the status bar, showing the number of connected drives and a countdown until the next monitoring update.

Pros

HDD Control 2 will give you a complete report of your hard drive’s status, including health level, performance and temperature. S.M.A.R.T. Data can be displayed and let you know if something is wrong, with a description of every attribute for the average users. You can perform benchmarks to test the speed of your hard drive(s), as well as view other details in the form of graphs. Benchmark results can be compared online too. Defragmenting drive(s) is also possible; you can even set the software to do an automatic defragmentation whenever it’s necessary by enabling the Pro-active defrag feature. Other features include a Drive and Internet cleaner, both of which search for and delete junk files and internet traces. Data recovery and Data destruction functions are implemented for recovering deleted files, or safely deleting data. Another useful feature is the Analysis tool, which scans your drive(s) and then lists all contents, sorting them by size.

Cons

No cons at all. It works perfectly and we have no complaints whatsoever.

Alternatives

There exist many alternatives, but very few are actually as good as HDD Control 2. One of them is CrystalDiskInfo (free), a utility with S.M.A.R.T. support that gives you through information about your hard drives and provides graphical results. HD Tune (paid) is another very good program, allowing you to perform benchmarks and hard drive tests, just like HDD Control 2.

Conclusion

Wide variety of useful features, perfectly stable program, no cons. If you need an application to monitor and control your hard drives, Ashampoo HDD Control 2 is one of the best choices available. Ignoring it is not a wise move.