We may be able to save our valuable data before it’s too late if we know the condition of our hard drives. Normally hard drive crashes are not random. All modern drives have a monitoring technology called S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) that continuously monitors a number of parameters on a hard drive. Many parameters can be monitored by S.M.A.R.T. including read and write error rates, seek error rates, spin up time, temperature and much more.

CrystalDiskInfo is a great monitoring program that can warn us if the temperature and the health of our drive is deteriorating. This is Open Source software. There is a portable version as well as an installer.

Other features are resident monitoring, alarm for temp and health, shows temp for each drive in system tray, S.M.A.R.T. and general info about internal/external hard drives, settings to adjust AAM /APM.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html