{"id":649978,"date":"2013-04-01T20:32:06","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T00:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betanews.com\/?p=140564"},"modified":"2013-04-01T20:32:06","modified_gmt":"2013-04-02T00:32:06","slug":"crystaldiskinfo-5-5-0-keeps-your-hard-drive-healthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/649978","title":{"rendered":"CrystalDiskInfo 5.5.0 keeps your hard drive healthy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Data loss can take many forms, but one of the most devastating is through physical drive failure. There\u2019s no knowing how long your hard drives will last — one drive might last well beyond its projected five-year lifespan while another identical model fails within six months. But it\u2019s not just bad luck that can shorten a drive\u2019s life — it\u2019s the physical environment it operates in (hotter hard drives die sooner) and how well it\u2019s maintained (a fragmented hard disk works a lot harder, and the physical stress again shortens its life).<\/p>\n

Windows can provide some built-in tools for monitoring hard drives, but you\u2019ll need a good third-party program to check on its physical status. The good news is, keeping an eye on your hard drive doesn\u2019t have to cost a cent, thanks to the freeware tool\u00a0CrystalDisk Info 5.5.0<\/a>.<\/p>\n

CrystalDiskInfo, also available as a\u00a0portable build<\/a>, allows you to monitor the health of all the physical hard disks attached to your PC — internal and many external USB drives — using their own built-in SMART tools plus any temperature-monitoring tools that may be present in the computer or hard drive.<\/p>\n

Each physical disk is clearly marked with a rating of Good, Caution or Bad, color-coded accordingly. Also displayed is the drive\u2019s current temperature, allowing you to see just how hot your drives are running (anything over 50 degrees C in a desktop should be considered bad for your drive\u2019s long-term health).<\/p>\n

Click on a drive\u2019s entry and you\u2019ll see plenty more information about the drive — its key statistics such as firmware, serial number and interface, plus its supported features. Also displayed are two useful figures: power-on count (the number of times the drive has been booted up) and power-on hours. These help monitor how long the drive has been in operation, which in turn can give you an idea of whether or not a replacement may be in order sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n

The tool also displays detailed SMART information about the drives — it\u2019s these figures which are used to generate the drive\u2019s overall health rating, and those marked yellow or red will be responsible for potential problems. It\u2019s worth Googling attribute names before panicking too much however, and with issues marked with Caution, simply keep an eye on the Current and Worst figures over a period of time to determine if the potential problem is stable or rapidly deteriorating, suggesting the drive will need replacing (after backing up).<\/p>\n

Version 5.5.0 has just been released with improved support for Intel and OCZ support, better support for Internet Explorer 10 and improved drive letter mapping.<\/p>\n

Both\u00a0CrystalDisk Info 5.5.0<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0CrystalDiskInfo Portable 5.5.0<\/a>\u00a0are available as freeware downloads for PCs running Windows XP or later.<\/p>\n

Photo Credit:<\/strong> vision001<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Data loss can take many forms, but one of the most devastating is through physical drive failure. There\u2019s no knowing how long your hard drives will last — one drive might last well beyond its projected five-year lifespan while another identical model fails within six months. But it\u2019s not just bad luck that can shorten […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7432,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7432"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}