{"id":694,"date":"2020-09-04T15:41:24","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T22:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=694"},"modified":"2020-09-04T15:47:27","modified_gmt":"2020-09-04T22:47:27","slug":"review-crystaldiskinfo","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/lars-pages\/review-crystaldiskinfo\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: CrystalDiskInfo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>CrystalDiskInfo is a very good SMART utility, and everyone should have one. In case you don&#8217;t know about it, SMART is a technology built into modern hard drives that allows the HD to report on its own state of wear. This can be invaluable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Certain parts in a hard drive (bearings, for example) are subject to wear over time, and SMART allows one to appreciate the current state of any hard drive. In the past, however, I&#8217;ve had problems finding a decent utility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I haven&#8217;t done admin in some years, so I haven&#8217;t been actively looking, but a friend recommended CrystalDiskInfo to me, so I thought I&#8217;d give it a try. I&#8217;m glad I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just install and run it (and connect a USB disk if you want to check it) and select the individual hard drive from the menu at the top. It will give you a one-word status summary (&#8220;Good&#8221;, &#8220;Caution&#8221;, or &#8220;Bad&#8221;) along with the drive&#8217;s temperature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re in a production setting, don&#8217;t use anything other than &#8220;Good&#8221; hard drives. Data loss is very hard on businesses. It&#8217;s not fun for individuals either, so I won&#8217;t use anything other than &#8220;Good&#8221; drives for my own data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is worth noting that SMART is not a cure-all. A &#8220;Good&#8221;-rated hard drive can still fail, because SMART only monitors things that wear out. It can&#8217;t tell you whether a solid-state component (a transistor or a chip) might fail, because such things don&#8217;t wear out, they just fail randomly. So be sure to back up your data, even though your hard drives rate Good with the software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><p align=\"center\"><a href=\"..\/\">Lar&#8217;s Pages<\/a><br><a href=\"..\/..\/\">Home<\/a><\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CrystalDiskInfo is a very good SMART utility, and everyone should have one. In case you don&#8217;t know about it, SMART is a technology built into modern hard drives that allows the HD to report on its own state of wear. This can be invaluable. Certain parts in a hard drive (bearings, for example) are subject [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":24,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/694"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":699,"href":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/694\/revisions\/699"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/piumasoft.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}