Hard Disk Sentinel Help - Overview

The current performance and health values of the selected hard disk are displayed.

Below the values, a text description of the current status is displayed. Hard Disk Sentinel analyses the S.M.A.R.T. attributes provided by the disk and by evaluating these values, it creates and displays a textual rating which may contain the number of problems encountered during the lifetime of the hard disk. This includes but not limited to the amount of bad sectors, weak (pending) sectors, spin up problems, data transfer (communication) errors, etc. depending on the device type (hard disk or SSD), connection (IDE/SATA/SCSI/SAS/USB/NVMe M.2 and so). The background color of the text description area (green, yellow, red) indicates the health of the disk. The text area may contain tips to correct the problems (and perform backup if the health suggests that) so it is recommended to read the details.

In the middle, some statistical information like the power on time and estimated remaining lifetime values are displayed. The process of measuring and calculating these values is described in the appendix. In addition, the total start/stop count and/or the total amount of written data may be displayed there, if applicable and the device provides such information.

Some special devices, like industrial (micro) SD cards require special attention and need to first configured for monitoring. This procedure is completely safe for stored information and does not affect the operation, capacity of the device in any ways, just tells Hard Disk Sentinel how to perform detection and display of status information. This can be enabled by clicking on Control device-specific detection below the text description.

At the bottom of the panel, the graphical history of the previously measured disk health values is displayed. Hard Disk Sentinel saves and displays the daily worst (lowest) health value measured every day and these values are displayed on this graph. If the application is used for a longer period, the scroll bar under the graph can be used to scroll to a previous date. By using the small disk icon, the graph can be saved as image (BMP or JPG).

Custom health thresholds

Double click on the Health % bar opens the Custom health thresholds window, where it is possible to specify custom yellow (warning) and red (alert) levels for this particular device, which is used when determining if the device should trigger alert (instead of the global thresholds set at Configuration: Thresholds / tray icon page. These values are useful (for example) to specify different, custom health thresholds for SSDs (where health % decrease is normal) and keep the default health thresholds for hard disks).