Hard Disk Sentinel is an application designed to monitor HDD activity and track the disk temperature, thus helping you prevent damage and data loss.
You may find the program a bit difficult to use when you first load it, but it's only because it sports a lot of features, showing valuable information basically anywhere you look.
Drives and partition are listed on the left side, along with health, temperature and free space, so it's easy to pick one and find more information about it.
On the other hand, the rest of the features are organized in tabs, together with detailed explanations to assist you all the time.
The 'Overview' tab shows brief information on performance and health, but also power on time and estimated remaining lifetime. Conducting a Surface Test will show even more information and help you fix potential problems.
The 'Temperature' section displays the current values for the selected drive, as well as the day's average and maximum temperature. Plus, it shows three different graphs with the current, the daily average and the daily maximum temperature.
Disk performance is the section that could prove most handy as it shows details such as total data read and write, current, average and maximum transfer rate, but also the estimated maximum transfer rate and the average disk activity.
Hard Disk Sentinel has a comprehensive settings menu to configure hotkeys, disk control, message settings, alerts and even the way the hard disk temperature icon will look in the System Tray.
There are multiple tests available, including Random Seek Test and Surface Test and it's better to close all the other applications before going in there to get the most accurate results possible.
All in all, Hard Disk Sentinel is definitely worth a try if you're afraid that something is wrong with your hard drives.

Limitations:
· 30 days trial
· Nag screen

What's New in This Release:
Improvements and new features:
· detect and display warning if the hard disk capacity can't be fully utilised or the actual hard disk controller / driver may cause data corruption because of mis-addressing large drives
· option to save separate authentic reports for selected hard disks, saving current date and time and version to authentic reports
· option to copy log of disk surface test to clipboard
· option to select shut down / restart / standby / hibernate to be done upon hard disk problem (PRO version)
· improved "Do not allow spin down of disks" function, maintain low load/unload count
· improved multi-language support
Improved hardware support:
· improved support for Intel RAID controllers with Intel RST driver version 11.6 and newer
· improved acoustic management / advanced power management / free fall control
· improved text description and support for Kingston SSDs, OCZ SSDs
· improved health and text description for Samsung 830 and 840 SSDs
· improved detection of multi-driv...