Hard Drive Sentinel SE - free on Bits du jour

Hard Drive Sentinel SE seems like pretty decent hard drive monitoring software, and it's free today from Bits Du Jour:

http://bitsdujour.com/

 

Stay away from this one!!! I used Hard Drive Sentinel earlier this year, and my external drives began to overheat, and fail one by one. After I uninstalled Sentinel the drive letters disappeared all together from Explorer. It was a major scare. I almost lost all my data that I had stored over the last 15 years!! I had to reinstall all the drivers for each one of my drives. The drives got so hot that touching the outside enclosures literally burnt my hand. I'm 100% positive this was caused by Sentinel. I had never had any problems out of the drives until installing Sentinel, and it happened immediately after installing Sentinel. Some of the drives have never worked right since which I'm sure was caused from the drives severely overheating.

 

You're scaring me now man. I've installed it. If what you're saying is true then .....damn!

 

No you didnt.

 

You mean I didn't install Sentinel? Or I have nothing to worry?

 

When did it start overheating, was it a few days after use, weeks, what? Please let me know, because I installed it on mine as well.

So far my hard drive is operating under normal standards, and remains about 32 degrees Celsius, confirmed by Hard Disk Sentinel as well as Speccy.

Due to poking around on the net, I found nothing but good reviews on the product (Many of them positive). There has only been a couple bad reviews that I read.

 

Thx R for sharing your experience. I'm a little assured now. I'll keep an eye on what Edge says.

 

I mean, like I said...the program is running A ok on my system, and everything reports back to me fine. I'll keep a close eye as to what he said too, but as far as I can tell...There is also a lot of people who gave it good ratings.

 

TheMozart

Could you please explain your comment "No you didn't". I also installed the program and it appears to be working just fine. But, I have two external drives that I only plug in when I need to access them. I haven't needed to do so but like you I have a ton of information on each of them that I sure wouldn't want to lose. Looking forward to your reply and I would thank you in advance.

John

 

I started having drive failures (notified by windows of hardware failure), and data corruption issues after my first reboot of installing Sentinel. About 2 to 3 hours later my drives (8 in all) began to overheat, and fail one by one. The drives got so hot they felt like they were a piece of tin in the hot sun all day. They felt like they would burn you to touch them. At that time I uninstalled Sentinel, and all 8 drives no longer existed in explorer or disk manager. It scared me so bad I almost threw up!! I was looking at loosing 15 years worth of data. I had to let the drives cool down, and I also had to uninstall all my disk drivers and reinstall them again before the drives could be recognized by windows again. It made me so mad that I though about suing because I was not sure what damage may have occurred or how much life span it may have taken away from the drives. I figured I would have to turn over all my data to be inspected to sue, and I did not like the thought of turning over my entire electronic life to someone if I absolutely did not have to so I decided not to pursue it. I'm not sure if I lost any data since their was so much to keep track of, and I did not have it indexed. I had never had any problems with any of those drives until I installed sentinel. Its pretty obvious that sentinel caused it. I will never use their software again.

Edited @ 0849: BTW.. this happened around late January or early February. I hope you guys don't have any issues!

 

I forgot to mention that 2 of the drives that was later recognized by windows appeared to be blank drives, and showing no files on those drives so I thought I may have completely lost all data on those 2 drives. The data reappeared later after uninstalling the disk drivers, and reinstalling them again for a third time, and letting the drives cool down for an additional 30 minutes or so. So you can imagine how mad / worried I was at that point.

 

Hmmm, wow...that is unfortunate that all this happened to you. I still have Hard Disk Sentinel on my systems, and so far everything is running A ok.

 

The name of the program is Hard Disk Sentinel, not Hard Drive Sentinel. There are two versions, Pro and Standard. I have used them occasionally for several years without any problems, but I have never run them for extended periods of time.

I checked the forum and the FAQ in the program site and found no references to overheating or related problems. I wonder if the overheating problem was ever reported to the author. I recall I had a fast response from him when I asked a question some time ago.

 

Quite right, thanks for correcting the name.

I installed it on my Windows 7 x64 system and it has been working fine. I have it displaying the hard disk temperature in the tray and so far there hasn't been any sign of my boot disk overheating. I turned on my external hard disk (usb interface) and HD Sentinel cannot display any information about it beyond it being a plugged USB device. In other words it can't interact with that disk. It would be interesting to know what version of the program Cutting_Edgetech was using. This latest v4 uses little memory and almost no CPU.

 

Something catastrophic obviously happened there.In normal conditions HDS can be set to shutdown the drives if the temp reaches any particular temp.Also some of the surface tests in HDS are destructive and will overwrite data if chosen.It sounds like that you didnt even get the chance to alter any options though.Out of curiosity did you contact the developer?

 

No, I didn't contact the developer. I almost lost 15 years worth of data. It would have done me no good to file a bug report because I was not about to reinstall the program to collect data for a bug report. There's no way I would ever install HD Sentinel ever again on my system. I worry that the lifespan of my drives may have been greatly lowered due to the overheating. I have thousands of dollars worth of storage space so if they do begin to fail early then it will be very expensive to replace my drives. I may have lost data from the incident, but like I said I have many tb's of data that is not indexed. So it was impossible to know if it was all recovered.