HDDlife Pro 4.0.182

Overview

A hard disk is one of the most important parts in a computer, allowing you to save plenty of data safely and keep it there until you decide to delete it. However, sometimes a hard disk starts to become unstable, its temperature levels are raised and it starts to fail. Depending on the problem you might be able to fix it, and even when that’s not possible you have to find a way and backup your data before they are gone. Therefore you need a utility which will monitor your hard disks and display their status with tons of information on them so that if a problem is beginning to make an appearance you will know it and take the required safety measures quickly. HDDlife Pro is that utility.

Installation

The setup wizard will guide you through the whole installation process and help you complete it. The steps it consists of are not different or harder than any other typical program’s installation steps. There are no harmful or any sort of additional 3^rd party software bundled in the package other than the main application.

Supported operating systems are Windows 2003, XP, 2008, Vista and 7.

Interface

The interface couldn’t be cleaner and more elegant. The main window has as many tabs as your drives, and clicking on each one will show that drive’s status. At the top you can see an overview and a graphic representation of the disk’s health; green means that there are no problems, yellow means an urgent state and red means critical condition. Below you can see the manufacturer’s name and model of the hard drive, the total size of the disk, its temperature, total work time, health status and performance percentage, as well as information regarding the available space in each of the logical disks (partitions) of this disk.

Pros

HDDlife Pro makes use of the S.M.A.R.T. technology, which is short for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. Essentially, S.M.A.R.T. monitors and reports any kinds of fault conditions, giving you the chance to act before it’s too late. HDDlife continuously monitors the hard drives in the background for any problems that might occur gradually or unexpectedly, leaving no valuable time wasted. To view the life status and temperature of a drive without opening the main window of the program you can check the tray icon, or better yet (thanks to the unique AnyView feature) go to My Computer window and under the list of hard drives you can see an icon representing their health.

For every partition in the disk you can view its label, file system, capacity and free space. Moreover, when a drive is in a bad state, you can configure HDDlife to automatically send a warning via the network you are connected to, or via email.

The program’s interface is translated into numerous languages: English, Afrikaans, Arabic, Belarusian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Turkish and Vietnamese.

Cons

There are definitely no cons in this program, it lacks no feature that a program of this category has.

Alternatives

Two alternatives to HDDlife Pro are Acronis Drive Monitor (free) and Active@ Hard Disk Monitor (paid). Mac users can check out SMART Utility (paid) if they wish, since it is packed with several nice features.

Conclusion

Extremely helpful software if you have multiple hard disks connected and it’s crucial to know their statuses. With this software running it’s impossible for a hard disk failure to catch you by surprise.