HDDlife FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions

How is it possible to forecast a hard drive failure anyway?

HDDlife uses the S.M.A.R.T. (SMART) technology. It is a special hard drive self-diagnostic system that constantly analyses the state of the disk during its operation and uses more than 20 various parameters to report its state. In turn, HDDlife tests all these technical parameters and displays the results in a comprehensible way.
More details about the S.M.A.R.T. technology are available here.

What temperature is normal for my hard drive?

We recommend that you avoid exceeding the working temperature of 40°C for usual hard drives and 45-50°C for laptops. However, short-term high temperatures (for instance, during disk defragmentation) are permissible.

Why doesn’t HDDlife monitor my USB disks?

Unfortunately, not all controllers of USB hard drives support S.M.A.R.T. commands so it is impossible to determine the state of health for such disks. Also, you can use trial version to check, does it show tab with info for your USB drive if it not present in this list.

Can I test HDDlife before buy?

Of course! You can download a fully functional trial version of HDDlife from our website. It runs for 14 days and lets you test all program features.
Moreover, we would even recommend you to do it BEFORE purchase. HDDlife works directly with the hardware (hard drives and SSDs) of your computer – and in some rare cases there may be hardware compatibility problems when you cannot access the hard drive data. Using the trial version is just to make sure that everything will be all right for you.