We all have valuable data on our hard drives, whether it’s pictures, financial data, word processing files or just assorted things. Hard drives in today’s machines are lasting longer and longer but the sizes are getting bigger and bigger so you can loose much more information if one fails. Wouldn’t it be nice to know ahead of time that your hard drive was having problems and may be about to fail? Well a company called Acronis has just released a free handy utility that will help do just that, its called Acronis Drive Monitor.

This utility sits in your task tray and constantly monitors the hard drive for temp, seek speed, spinup time and all of the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) parameters. If the program detects any of the values to be out of bounds it will notify you. The notification is also configurable so it can just do a popup on screen or it can be set to email you able the problem. This option is handy if you want to monitor drives on a remote machine or server that you don’t look at everyday but would still like to keep track of. All disks will fail but now you will have a better chance of knowing ahead of time so you can save your information and replace the drive before it is beyond help. The software runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 as well as Server 2003 and 2008.

Acronis Drive Monitor can be found here.

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