CrystalDiskInfo is a free and open source software that gives you very detailed info about your hard disks and some USB disks. CrystalDiskInfo lets you monitor health and temperature of your hard disk, and also get S.M.A.R.T. information. S.M.A.R.T. information helps you in knowing that your hard disk is working fine.
From Wikipedia:
Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or S.M.A.R.T. (sometimes written as SMART), is a monitoring system for computer hard disks to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures.
CrystalDiskInfo makes it extremely easy to get all the information about your hard disk. Once you install CrystalDiskInfo, it sits in system tray, and keeps monitoring your disk. Whenever it detects that your hard disk temperature has increased above threshhold, it pops-up a warning message. If you want to scan your hard disk for bad sectors, you can use HDDScan.
To get detailed information about your hard disk, just click on CrystalDiskInfo ikon in your system tray. This pops up CrystalDiskInfo with all the information that you need about your hard disk. Another interesting freeware to monitor your hard disks: DriveSMART.
CrystalDiskInfo shows following information:
General Information about HDD/SSD:
- Hard Disk Model and Hard Disk Capacity
- Health of Hard Disk and Temperature of hard disk
- Firmware, Buffer Size, Serial Number, NV Cache Size, Interface, Rotation Rate, Power On Count, Power On Hours, Transfer Mode, Drive Letter, and Supported features.
S.M.A.R.T. Information:
- Read Error Rate
- Spin-Up time
- Start/Stop Count
- Reallocated Sector Count
- Seek Error Rate
- Seek Time Performance
….. and lot more.
CrystalDiskInfo also has a graph window that shows the S.M.A.R.T. information in a graphical form.
CrystalDiskInfo shows a very detailed information about your hard disk, and is a good tool for advanced users to keep a tab on health of your hard disk.