Best Free Disk Health Monitoring Program

by Mike 4 August 2008 9 Comments

The Freeware Mission enters another week. This is the 22nd episode, 21 more to go. Now I’m going to pick the best free disk health monitoring solution. We all know that hard disks aren’t exactly the most reliable components in a computer system, so it’s quite important to monitor their health status and do something before it would be too late.

I’ve tested a few so-called freeware disk health monitoring programs. Unfortunately many of them are actually “crippleware” – the functions are crippled so that anytime you need to do something important with the program you have to “buy the pro version”. Fortunately I found Crystal DiskInfo – it’s really freeware and it’s exactly what I needed.

It supports S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, it is a monitoring system for computer hard disks to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures), you can set it to run in the background and display alerts if something is wrong with one of the hard disks. Basically it monitors the temperature and the health status and tells you if something is above the safe levels. And that’s exactly what I needed.

You can download Crystal DiskInfo from here, it’s free!

My Evaluation	9
Operating System	Windows All
Size	756 KB
Author	hiyohiyo
Version Tested	1.0.15

21 episodes until the Freeware Mission will reach its goal, a freeware only PC! Stick around to see great freeware reviewed!

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9 Comments »

cherry said:

tried to d/l this about 7 times-kept taking me to a place where i have to pay $133.00-wheres the free program?

# 5 September 2008 at 11:55 am

Johnny Karp said:

@cherry
The page is there, it seems that you can’t locate the program in the page. No problem, here’s the direct link to the file:
http://dl.crystaldew.info/download/CrystalDiskInfo10.zip
Hope it’ll work for you this time.

# 5 September 2008 at 12:13 pm

Bilgisayarınız İçin 72 Ücretsiz Yazılım | catlakses.com said:

[...] Crystal DiskInfo – Gerçek zamanlı sabit disk izleme aracı. Sabit diskiniz hakkında derinlemesine bilgi verir. [...]

# 23 January 2009 at 3:25 pm

Networx – Free Bandwidth Monitoring and Benchmarking Program « widaca said:

[...] Best Free Disk Health Monitoring Program The Freewa [...]

# 20 June 2009 at 6:07 am

xnibis said:

Could you maybe mention more programs and whats up with that “best” program, are you looking for more hits from web ? Ok so if its best what other program have you tested ? Have you tried HD Tune for example ? or any other ?

# 22 June 2009 at 1:57 pm

Johnny Karp said:

@xnibis
This post is part of a series of posts, and the “best” attribute is provisional. You can look at this blog as a continuous “work in progress” as I’m always trying to find better programs than the current “best”. Until then, it’s the best for me and that’s why it’s still installed in my PC. And last but not least, thanks for recommending HD Tune, it looks quite promising but I’m a little bit put off by the fact that it has a “pro” version with a lot more features than the free one.

# 22 June 2009 at 9:48 pm

xnibis said:

Sorry if i sounded a little bit harsh, had a bad day ;] i’ve found out about HD Tune when it was still freeware without any mention of pro version, i’ve promoted it on few sites (uploaded it to fileforum) but you see if its not open source, anything can happen :/

# 24 June 2009 at 2:16 pm

Johnny Karp said:

No problem mate, thanks for the comments.

# 24 June 2009 at 2:32 pm