Acronis Drive Monitor Editor's Review

Acronis Drive Monitor is a tool that will monitor your hard drives health status and report various indicators of reliability. To do so, the software is using your hard drives S.M.AR.T. capabilities (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) to provide you with analysis of current conditions and temperatures.

After you install the program, it will run in background but you can easily open it using the System Tray icon. The program will stay in silent mode till something isn't right or a value reaches a critical threshold. At that moment, the tool will notify you by a pop-up window or in case you configure it to do so, it will warn you by sending a message to your email address (useful when you want to keep an eye on more then one computer).

The software interface it's simple and intuitive. When you open it, you'll view into the summary panel. In here you can check if there is anything that might concern you about your hard drives (e.g. critical events that might indicate an increased risk for data safety). If you enter the Disks menu, you'll be able to see many hard drive properties (as temperature, seek error rate, spin-up time and many more) as well as the overall health status for each disk. In the options section, you can configure the warning and alert threshold temperature (recommendation: try finding the normal working temperature of you hard drive model and set the warning level according to your hard drive specification).

Pluses:Notification by email about hard drive status; it's free!

Drawbacks / flaws: The hard drive temperatures are displayed only in Fahrenheit and in this version of the software you can't set it to Centigrade; there should be the possibility to set the warning temperature for each drive.

In conclusion: In the hope of anticipating failures, Acronis Drive Monitor might be a good friend, warning you when there is still time to take action (such as copying the data to a replacement device).

version reviewed: 1.0 (build 194)