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Did you ever lose an entire hard drive with all your data? I hope you didn't have to go through such an event, because I had to, and it wasn't pleasant at all. Now, everything works fine, and the next minute, all that you've been working on in the last months goes away like smoke in the wind!

No, we're not going to talk about data recovery software today, although that would be a good idea. Since it's always better to prevent than to cure, now we'll talk about HDD Life Pro, a software application built to help you watch your hard drive's "health" closely to know when you should start to backup your data more often and prepare to purchase a new one, if the warranty has expired.


Setup

The last version of HDDlife Pro is 3.0.146, and comes in a setup package that weighs almost 6MB in size. The trial version will work just like the full program for 15 days, then the Pro features will be disabled and the program will continue to work in freeware mode, but I think that two weeks should be enough for you to decide if HDDlife Pro is worth its 35$ price or not. Installing this application is very easy, as you can see below, so let's move on...

Interface
The main window of the program, as you can see in the screenshot to the left, is not something hard to understand at all, but there's more than just this to HDDlife Pro. Inside the system tray, the current temperature of your hard drive is displayed, and an icon that represents the health of your drives is present in Windows Explorer and other programs in your computer. Now, let's see what remains to be said about the features...


Features

Today, all hard drives on the market have the SMART technology built in, being able to warn you about a mechanic failure before this happens. Anyway, don't expect to hear your hard drive shouting for help, because you need to view the SMART data and have an interpretation for each value, or an overall report.

This is exactly what HDDlife Pro does, checking those cryptic SMART values and returning to you only two big results in plain english - health and performance status of your hard drive. On the other hand, if you're an expert and want to check every smart parameter of your drive, you can do it with only a few mouse clicks!

Taking things further than just checking your hard drive status, HDDlife Pro also cares for your sleep. Since a lot of people leave their computers running at night for various purposes, you can use this program to reduce noise level and power consumption, using a simple slider with two extremes - slower/quieter and faster/louder.

If something bad is lurking around the corner, HDDlife Pro can send email and network alerts, apart from jumping up with a popup on your desktop. At last, you should be aware that the performance of your hard drive is also measured including the free space factor, so if your new hard drive's performance drops from 100% to 60% in a week, that doesn't mean it became already "tired".


The Good

HDDlife Pro is very easy to use, looks good and does its job wonderfully. Its 35$ price tag is OK with me, since date recovery or recovery labs that can help you get back your data after a crash can cost much more.

The Bad

There are no graphs to study the evolution in time of your hard drive's parameters. All that you can see is its status now.

Conclusion

Although not the best hard drive status monitor, HDDlife Pro is a very good program, that's what I can tell you. If it is worth your money or not, that's what you should decide after taking it for a trial run. As usual, you know what to do... just hit the download link and enjoy this piece of code!

Developer: BinarySense, Ltd.
Price: 35$
Trial Link: Download