Testimonials about Hard Disk Sentinel
Detailed Use case of Hard Disk Sentinel in server / RAID configurations
Testimonial provided by Dave Constant
Senior IT Analyst
Security Systems Manager
County Local Government, California, US
Hard Disk Sentinel has been operational for over one year within our 24 / 7 Local Government organization. It actively monitors PC and Server class computers operating our Video Management, Electronic and Security Control Systems.
We utilize the Enterprise Server with over 35 field clients (and expanding) with OS's ranging from Windows XP Embedded to Windows 8.1 on 32 and 64 bit platforms. These clients constitute over 110 hard drives monitored. Additional clients operate stand-alone where no connection is available to the HDS server. Built in Client alerting options make this possible.
By using HDS for monitoring and alerting of our critical systems we have been able to reduce interruption of service and be pro-active with maintenance tasks. The configurable early warning features provided by HDS are most excellent.
Normally I don't provide comments for products I expect to work as designed. Hard Disk Sentinel deserves recognition as it exceeded expectations.
I look forward to the next release.
Testimonial provided by Patrick Bye 
We were looking for a tool that would notify us of hard disk drive failures rather than checking each server individually as we had to in the past. With more servers coming online, we needed a tool that would automate this for us. Hard Disk Sentinel fit the bill. Not only did it tell us of failed hard disk drives, it also notified us of drives that were failing allowing us to replace them before they completely failed. HD Sentinel is great, I wouldn't build a server without it.
Testimonial provided by Steve Holmes 
I wanted to thank you for your program Hard Disk Sentinel!
We are a small MSP in Southern California. A few months back we had a batch of relatively new Dell servers
that had RAID problems. The Dell Open Manage utility was reporting the RAID and drives were perfectly healthy,
yet some were in fact in poor health and ready to fail. We didn't realize what was happening until it
was too late in some cases, and a bad drive corrupted the array. One of my techs introduced me to Hard
Disk Sentinel so I started to research your program. We have many small clients so when I learned
that you have a console that would allow me to monitor all our clients from our office outside of their network, I was very excited.
We ran a trial and I could immediately see the value of Hard Disk Sentinel.
Now we use Hard Disk Sentinel on all of our client servers and routinely monitor the individual drive health for
all our clients. We have already proactively replaced drives for several clients where the drive
health was very poor, yet Open Manage was reporting good health. It has prevented downtime for our
clients and saved us the headache of rebuilding crashed servers and arrays.
Thank you for Hard Disk Sentinel. It is a wonderful tool!
Testimonial provided by Paolo CENTRONI, www.computerassistance.it
Hard Disk Sentinel: one of the most useful blades of our software Swiss army knife.
We have been using Hard Disk Sentinel for three years now: it has become an essential part of our monitoring work, which takes place on at least 300 clients across dozens of small and medium-sized customer sites.
We could not do without it anymore, the monitoring functionality of the single disks is excellent even behind the RAID controllers, not to mention the functionality of checking the hours of operation or single bad sectors, disk by disk, from the most critical machines to the PC of the warehouse. We have configured the e-mail notification service and it works great, in addition to the excellent configurability it is also possible to deploy widely through the initialization file. Excellent possibility to start the program as a service on clients.
Thanks to this product we are able to offer a customer service that is near excellence, we have not had a block of operations in three years due to disks failures. Luck, of course, but the replacement already when the very first small problems occur and therefore in normal maintenance (the discs are still easily clonable) helps, and not a little.
Excellent and fast support, updates guaranteed so far.
It worked immediately (even before the release since we tested it as insiders) with Windows 11, demonstrating that it is a program written as it should be.
I know it looks like "the perfect family in advertising" review, but that's it ...
Great job, keep it up.
Testimonial provided by Joey L.
Just wanted to say thanks for the always improving (and best) Hard Disk Sentinel.
I have a Pro license on my main house server (with approx. 80 HDDs).
A Standard license on my daily computer (NVMe boot, and 2 hard disk drives in RAID 1)
And for a while have been wanting to setup a separate on/off machine just for stress testing HDDs
for a week or two, for when I buy them (for clients etc). I still *always* buy my fav
HDD, Hitachi 2 or 3tb "HUA" Enterprise SATA drives (used).
When I saw all the improvments you have made in version 5, I was motovated to finally
setup that test machine (using spare Supermicro parts I had around), and of course it
will be running Hard Disk Sentinel Pro with this license.
Thanks again.
Testimonial provided by Century 21 Mike Bowman, Inc.
(http://www.c21bowman.com)
Hard Disk Sentinel is an invaluable tool for our company. We use the Linux version extensively on our servers to monitor our hard drives. We have the output connected to our Nagios monitor and with this setup, we have, on several occasions been able to replace a disk in a RAID array before a failure. The allows us to avoid any downtime or outages with our services.
I highly recommend Hard Disk Sentinel for everyone. Disk failures are common and being aware of the health of your disk allows you to plan and avoid costly downtime. It has proved its value in our organization time and time again. It goes way beyond standard S.M.A.R.T monitoring and give you a much better idea of overall drive health. I wouldn't run a system without it.
Testimonial provided by Brandon Wall
We have been using Hard Disk Sentinel for several years now and we could not be happier. We have nearly 50 servers in our environment and performing any sort of periodic check on the health of drives was nearly impossible before we started using Hard Disk Sentinel. This software gave us several opportunities to identify potential drive failures before they occurred and prevented any sort of downtime, data loss, or lost revenue caused by a disk failure.
The software developer has done a wonderful job of answering our questions and making sure we had everything we needed to fully utilize the software. I would highly recommend this software to anyone looking to become more proactive with disk replacement and minimize unplanned downtime.
Testimonial provided by Brad Callaghan, Mungo Industries
Needing to manage an entire fleet of hard disk drives in not only your primary storage server(s), but in every system across your network - there's nothing else out there that comes close to Hard Disk Sentinel. It's one thing to generally keep an eye on the health of your hard disk drives - it's another to be able to pool all that data in one place for fast management. Hard Disk Sentinel does this so elegantly from it's easy to read layout to user-friendly settings and automated email warnings of thresholds on health, space & temperature - all of which are configurable to what you feel are acceptable limitations for your working environment.
When it comes to hard disk drives, it's not a matter of IF they fail - it's a matter of WHEN they fail. Hard Disk Sentinel has allowed me to predict this failure and act accordingly to avoid the hassle of data loss or downtime. Hard Disk Sentinel is an essential piece of software in my admin toolkit, so should it be yours.
Testimonial provided by ICSC Ltd New Zealand
Our company provides support for a number of industrial clients. When a PC crashes it can cause downtime in production, which can be expensive for the client.
We recently installed HD Sentinel Professional on 35 PCs for one of our clients, and immediately discovered 3 failing hard drives which needed replacement.
Being able to replace the drives before they failed, and at a time that was convenient to us and the client, meant a saving in time and disruption which made up for the cost of the software immediately. I will be recommending that we install this at all the sites we support.
Testimonial provided by TopTech LLLP
Hard Disk Sentinel is actively serving and protecting more than 200 machine with central management on
the sites of our clients for almost two years. To summarize our experiences: we can say that the possible
hard disk failures are likely to be predicted by the software and this allowed to perform complete
backup and replace the hard disk drives before failure.
Originally we thought that a lot of hard disk failures occur suddenly. But in fact, hard disk failures predictable in
advance - and this is the most important benefit of Hard Disk Sentinel.
For us, availablity and stored data is mission critical, so as soon as the health were just one percent fell
below 100%, we immediately initiated exchange of hard drives. Of course no data loss happened
and we could carefully plan and perform the required actions to optimize maintenance.
Also constant monitoring the temperature of the hard disk drives in the central management allowed
us to discover problems with fans and cooling - and improve the situation which has beneficial effects
for the condition of the overall system and improved the reliability as well.
Hard Disk Sentinel is a great addition to our infrastructure, thanks for the development to and wish you good luck!
Testimonial provided by LuK Savaria Ltd.
250 industrial PCs (a mixture of Windows NT and XP) are protected by Hard Disk Sentinel
Pro 3.70 connected to the Hard Disk Sentinel Enterprise Server application for over 9 months.
During this period, Hard Disk Sentinel reported numerous hard disk failure conditions and related problems
and allowed us to solve these problems and this could effectively reduce the production losses due downtime.
Thanks to the continuous hard disk monitoring, we have a clear picture about the status of our storage devices.
Hard Disk Sentinel is easy to use, stable and it is also valid for the Server version. The support received
is excellent, fully customer focused and in all cases was very fast!
Testimonial provided by Urhida town council
In the offices of our town council Hard Disk Sentinel Professional software not only protects the data by monitoring hard disks on workstations, but also Hard Disk Sentinel Professional performs periodic and automatic data backup to a central backup server, which also runs the Hard Disk Sentinel Enterprise Server software to protect the network by its central management features. The overall system was installed, configured just in minutes and is working smoothly in the recent years. The software helped many times to avoid loss of data.
Testimonial provided by Sevenoil EST OÜ
We have been using Hard Disk Sentinel since October 2012. We chose Hard Disk Sentinel because it has the best monitoring capabilities and reporting thru its central Enterprise Server. Knowing that all our workstations and Point of Sales computers hard disk drives are in good health is very important to us. With Hard Disk Sentinel we can act proactively, by changing hard disks before they break down and generate data loss, or in more worst scenarios, take offline a POS computer that directly impacts our business income. We recommend using Hard Disk Sentinel on all your company computers so your system administrators can sleep peacefully.
Testimonial provided by PAS Technologies Inc.
(www.pas-technologies.com)
Working as a government and civilian contractor in the aerospace industry we depend on our data being available in a split second. Even archived data is critical. Recently a hard drive that stored our archived was failing unbeknownst to us. Hard Disk Sentinel alerted me to the fact that a failure was imminent and to back up the drive immediately. We did with no time to spare. No sooner than the last bit of data on a 1.5 TB was copied to another drive the drive became very flakey. I suppose the only way it will work will be to store it in a refrigerator but I have better plans for it. A couple of passes through the band saw and in an acid bath. That should destroy any data that could have been recoverable.
I have a lot a respect and appreciation for Hard Disk Sentinel. We'll be adding licenses to cover all of our major equipment.
Testimonial provided by Peter W.
I started with Hard Disk Sentinel many years ago and chose it as my desired application after trialing several others which were available at the time, because of its clean, attractive, and very useable graphics and absolutely effective sub menus. It has been a constant companion on my computer desktop through many changes of operating system and probably about six different computers within this time frame.
I have learned to trust its S.M.A.R.T. reporting and solved a number of hardware problems with its help. I have found it to be very accurate and take any warning messages it sends, very seriously. Two of the top problems it has warned against have been hard disk cabling and heat and these have prompted me to do two things;
1) On purchasing a new P.C., Immediately take the tower case side panels off and install an external, small pedestal fan which is turned on as soon as H.D.S notifies that internal temperatures have risen above 40 degrees centigrade. Needles to say, the chassis is then installed in a situation where tiny fingers cannot experimentally pry into the workings!
2) On any report that there are data transfer problems I turn off the computer and unfasten the hard drive connecting cables and clean the pins and sockets with a damp , lintless cloth lightly soaked with methylated spirits. If that doesn't stop the problems I start replacing cables and if that remedy is insufficient I start to suspect the power supply, and I have had several of them fail in the past.
These measures have given our two home computers more hardware stability than we were able to enjoy before using H.D.S and I now regard it as a very reassuring companion in my desktop system tray. Of late I haven't needed to dig into the more technical aspects of available controls, probably because of advances in motherboard manufacture and onboard software controls. However, I cannot see myself ever being without its help,
Testimonial provided by Tony Glinskas
I consider myself as being 'computer savvy' and like to try different computer hardware and software. I had another Hard Disk Monitoring Software which I had purchased a few months ago. I frequently checked the status of my hard drives and felt assured that 'all is well' with my system. I did not want to lose any important data.
The other Monitoring software indicated that my Boot Drive was 95 to 97% healthy whenever I checked it and I was pleased. I then saw your Hard Disk Sentinel software and thought that a 'second opinion' would be nice. To my horror, your program indicated that my hard drive was critically unhealthy. I quickly checked my old 'standby' program and it was still 95% with only very minor problems. I ignored your software monitoring and thought of uninstalling your 'error prone' software which gave me flase readings. Soon thereafter, I checked both programs and my old program assured me that all is well with still a 95% Health rating and your Hard Disk Sentinel issused warnings of immediate failure. I said to myself that I need to immediately uninstall your 'useless' program which just wanted to scare me. I powered down my system and heard some 'funny' noises and wondered.
The next day, to my horror, my system would not reboot! I took the Boot Drive and placed in another computer to check it out. Then, I learned that Hard Disk Sentinel was CORRECT and my other software monitoring program was DEAD WRONG for my boot drive was now DEAD!
Now, I am a believer, but I wished that I had believed earlier for some recent data was never backed up and is now lost forever. I was not very computer 'savvy' afterall!
Thank you for a Super Product and 'BLANKETY-BLANK' to that other company....
Testimonial provided by BearPup
Another Benefit Of Monitoring Your Hard Drives
Most folks don't think about their hard drives until they come crashing to a halt; given the reliability of modern hard drives that's not an unreasonable view. By the same token, a little forethought can make our drives last that much longer, and Hard Disk Sentinel (HDS) makes doing that very much easier. Here's what I'm talking about.
Every time you start a disk - whether it be Window's swap file, a fixed hard drive, or one connected via USB or Firewire, the arm containing the read / write heads must move from its protected landing zone out and over the spinning disk platters. And as you watch this picture a small 'mountain' appears, a one micron piece of dust reaches upwards to brush by the heads. No matter how precise your drive was assembled or the quality of the components, these little mountains are bound to arise.
HDS prevents this scenario from happening. From within the Configuration menu, go to Advanced options -> Disk Control -> Do not allow spin down of hard disks. There you can specify the hard disk number in the leftmost panel (0, 1, etc...) or a * to prevent spin down of all hard disks by periodically sending a command to the external hard disk, forcing it to keep alive, preventing it from spinning down.
Questions about this? Contact the Developer directly, he's been very available to answer questions. I hope this helps folks, and doesn't overwhelm.
Testimonial provided by Centre Reine Fabiola
We have 20 servers. The periodic manual check (2 time a month) on the health of drives costed
time and was not efficient. The check was limited to S.M.A.R.T monitoring and free space percentage.
HDSentinel offer an excellent detection capability, email alert functionality, dashboard, affordable price.
This is what we were looking for. I recommend.
Your opinions, feedbacks and experiences always welcome. Feel free to write us your comments which help further development - and also it is great honour to share your words on this page. Thanks!