Reviewer, 2008-08-18 07:34:00

ActiveSMART utilizes the S.M.A.R.T. technology to track the status of the computer hard disks. Its main goal is timely detecting and anticipating any problems, occurring with the disk, before the danger of the data loss appears.

Pros: ActiveSMART is a diagnostic and failure prediction software for hard drives. It uses S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) to monitor the health status of Hard Disk Drives. SMART is supposedly developed by major drive manufacturers to monitor drive health during operation. It monitors drive temperature and depending on the read/write and other performance data it is able to predict impending drive failures. For example, motor and/or bearing failure can be predicted by an increase in the drive spin-up time and the number of retries it takes to get the drive spinning at full speed. Or, if the drive notes that error correction is being needed excessively, it can attribute this to a broken drive head or surface contamination, and it will create an alert before the problem gets worse. System administrator can make a backup copy of key data and replace a suspect device preventing data loss and downtime. Statistics suggest about 70% of failures are detected by the technology.

ActiveSMART uses the same technology and has several monitoring modes and is intended for both personal and extensive computer systems use. By enabling the SMART technology the application is able to retrieve internal diagnostic information from your disks, analyze and show it. Disk health, performance and status can be determined. Monitoring goes on in the background and you get alerts when something is about to happen to the disk drive. Additionally you can check how old is your hard drive, how many read or write errors it collected, change the drive power mode or noise level and so on. Various local and remote monitoring modes and alerting options are available. In case of error detection, there is a range of alerting options available via local pop ups and audio alerts or remotely via e-mail & network messenger.

Cons: It is simple enough to not cause any problematic issue.

Overall this fulfills a vital need that can save a lot of hassle and is easy to use. This is 4 star material.