We just got the word that one of best storage monitoring utilities reached its third generation - Hard Disk Sentinel reached version 3.00. The latest version brings a lot of code improvements when it comes to working with flash-based storage devices such as SSD specific-information and attributes, USB drives, SATA multipliers, e-SATA, SCSI, external enclosures, products such as DAS [Desktop Attached Storage]. The application also brings significantly improved intensive disk tests for verifying health of your HDD/SSD. The tests include simple read tests, re-initialization, industry standard data-destruction, data area refresh, temperature and transfer speed measurements.
Disk Contents Inspector will check for stored information on the drives in question. Besides the tests, there is also advanced monitoring of storage devices. There is a free download, but in order to unlock all the advanced features, you should purchase the unlock key [Standard license is 18 EUR or $23, Professional version goes for 28 EUR or $35, while Enterprise version starts at 5.5 EUR per seat]. Application is available in 16 languages, including Chinese [Mandarin], Dutch, German, Spanish an many more.
We have checked the utility but ran into a roadblock on our test system. RAID [Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks] users might have an issue with the Hard Disk Sentinel v3.00, as it did not recognize our RAID0 configuration based on two 600GB Seagate Cheetah 15.7K hard drives [Marvell's 88SE6320 SAS controller]. Upon contacting the developer, we learned that this controller is just of many that do not provide access to the hard disks configured in RAID arrays. If you have a 3ware, AMCC, Areca or HighPoint RAID controllers feature non-standard functions which allow for HDD Sentinel to detect more information about the drives in array. The full list of supported controllers is available on Hard Disk Sentinel Compatibility page.
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