Keep your hard drives in good condition with this set of utilities from Ashampoo.
I think it's fair to say that very few computer users give much thought to their hard drives. They just sit there passing data back and forth and last forever... right? No... wrong! They have a life expectancy like everything else, and have a habit of failing at the most inopportune moment. This means that investing in some software that can keep them in tip top condition, while possibly warning you of impending disaster, seems sensible. This latest product from Ashampoo will do all that, and a whole lot more as well.
The HDD Control program is something of a fix-all hard drive solution that encompasses everything from health checks, to recovering inadvertently deleted files. In fact there are a number of ways to keep your drives in good condition, regular defragmentation is one and removing unused and temporary files is another. Yet it's been my experience that very few users ever bother to do either, the result being that the computer gets slower and slower. Luckily this is another feature of HDD Control 3, and it's automatic.
When you install the program, the first thing it does is to run a system check on any hard drives it finds attached, either internal or external. The results are displayed within tabs for each drive. From here you can run further tests - for example, an extended S.M.A.R.T. test or perhaps run a full disk surface test. Incidentally the program is optimised for SSD drives as well, so if you have any they are also tested.
You can also run a benchmark test; this an interesting one, because on completion the information is sent to the Ashampoo website. Next a browser window opens showing a comparison of your results against hundreds of other hard drives. It's nice to know if you're getting the performance that you paid for.
The system reports are useful because they compile an ongoing history of messages that show how efficient your drives are. This comes as a drop down list of possible errors, alongside a graph that relates to the particular message and selected drive.
The maintenance section includes a more efficient defrag option, that shows the current state of each drive with just a single click. I was pleased to see a warning appear when I selected my SSD drive; because of course defragging these drives can seriously reduce their life spans. Other options include a drive and internet cleaner, which removes any temporary files, or those deposited on your drive from websites you may have visited. Another plus point here is that the overall settings dialogue allows you to decide what will be deleted; because you don't want to lose your bookmarks, or retype passwords on every visit.
The last two utilities are Review and Security. The first concerns how much space is used by a particular file type (again determined by the settings dialogue), with results shown by folder in both a bar and pie chart. Review also acts as a duplicate Finder, which is pretty much self explanatory.
Finally you have the Security tab. Again there are two options: File Wiper (a utility to remove files using a security algorithm) and Undelete (which scans the selected drive for any deleted files). I tested this by deleting some image files and then tried to recover them using the program. Unfortunately the program failed miserably and only seemed to find a mass of deleted system files - even when I specified the .jpg extension. So it's not perfect, but this was the only issue I could find so overall I'm still happy to recommend it. Joe Lavery
A genuinely useful suite of hard drive utilities.