Review of ActiveSMART by Ariolic Software                              Printer friendly version

Are you looking for a simple and effective way to prevent and predict hard disk failures? Are you an IT professional looking to add a hard disk monitoring utility to your software arsenal? Is your data simply too important to risk data loss? If you answer yes to any of these questions, ActiveSMART by Ariolic Software is for you.
This superb program is designed to monitor the health of your hard drives and predict imminent hardware failures to prevent data loss by reading the S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology) attributes of your hard drive. ActiveSMART analyzes up to 25 manufacturer parameters of your hard drive and creates detailed reports about the disk state. It also allows users to preview the raw values of the SMART attributes, including how long the disk has been running and the number of read/write errors.

Additionally, ActiveSMART allows users to control the temperature of their hard drives. This feature is very important as overheating may result in a catastrophic drive failure, which may lead to total data loss. ActiveSMART monitors the drive temperature and alerts the user when it gets too hot by displaying a pop-up message, playing a sound, and even sending a network message or an email. This leads me to the next unique feature of this program – the notification options.

System administrators can be notified of an impending drive failure on any machine in the network via ActiveSMART’s internal messaging system. Moreover, ActiveSMART has a built-in SMPT client which means that it can send out email notifications about the drive status, even when no mail software is installed on the computer. These features give system administrators the ability to monitor all the hard drives in a network without actually having to check each one physically. What’s more, ActiveSMART can be set up to take action once the state of the hard drive changes – simply enable the emergency shutdown feature and ActiveSMART will automatically put your computer into hibernate if the drive overheats.
ActiveSMART is an excellent tool for end users and IT professionals alike. With its customizable features, automation capabilities and low usage of system memory,
this program is well worth looking at. You can find the fully-functional trial version at http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart.

Alex Bezborodov
Technical Writer
Accurate Data Recovery
www.a-datarecovery.com