PassMark Disk Checkup tool: Monitor Your Netbook Hard Drive

PassMark DiskCheckup tool is a simple and free solution to check the health of your netbook’s hard drive. SMART is the acronym for Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. It provides various monitoring indicators for disk reliability. If SMART is enabled on a hard disk, the user can receive analytical information from the hard drive to figure out any possible future failure of the hard drive.

PassMark DiskCheckup allows the user to check the SMART attributes of a particular hard disk drive. SMART monitors elements of possible long-term drive failure, such as ‘Spin Up Time’, start/stops, the number of hours powered on and the hard disk temperature.

DiskCheckup displays the current values of the SMART attributes, along with the Threshold value for that attribute. The app keeps monitoring SMART parameters which includes elements of possible long-term drive failure, such as ‘Spin up Time’, ‘Disk Temperatures’ etc. If the value of a particular attribute goes below the threshold then it indicates a problem for your hard drive. The threshold is set according to the hard disk specifications.

To get started, you just need to download the free software and double-click the installer to install it. The user interface is very simple and easy to use. DiskCheckup provides you with device information of your hard disk and information about the smart parameters. It also provides the history of each SMART attributes according the refresh time set from the Configuration menu. It also displays device information, such as the drive geometry, serial number, model number, media rotation rate, and supported features. It can be configured to send e-mail notification when a SMART attribute has been detected to be less than the allowable threshold value.

This simple application doesn’t seem to consume significant CPU resources and thus you can keep it running in the background without any performance hit. The application monitors the changes over long period so do not panic if it predicts some wrong threshold exceed date initially, but you can always remain cautious.

DiskCheckup is free for personal use. It supports Windows XP, 2003 Server, 2008 Server, Vista and Windows 7.