View Full Version : Freeware - Hard drive status/health?
kevzik
08-16-2006, 11:24 PM
Can anyone recommend a freeware program that checks up on your HD. Mines acting werid and I am afraid of faliure. Thanks.
Riyonuk
08-16-2006, 11:38 PM
What kinda weird? Is it making clicking sounds? Does your PC just freeze and you gotta restart? Those could mean HD Failure.
ofacto
08-16-2006, 11:54 PM
Here's a good one (HDDLife) that is sort of free, download the trial here:
http://www.hddlife.com/eng/download-freeware.html
and they will give you a free license if you publish a review of the program on your blog:
http://www.hddlife.com/eng/hddlife-free-for-bloggers.html
kevzik
08-17-2006, 02:07 AM
My HD is prob okay, but for some reason my dvds on my HD arent playing smoothly, yet off my external HD my dvds play fine...strange. Ill figure it out soon, but I might as well make sure my HD is ok.
kevzik
08-17-2006, 02:42 AM
Think I know whats wrong...My video card seems to be it. When I play dvd files of my HD they skip a bit, I also have dual moniters going. Now when I disable one of them, no skipping seems to occur. Could this be because my VC only has 128 mbs of ram? BUT for some reason I can run dual moniters and play dvd files off my external HD and it seems to play fine...IDK, its werid. MY HDs seem fine tho, thanks for the help!
HumanSnatcher
08-17-2006, 03:06 AM
Yeah, you might want to get a card that has 256 ram on it. 128 doing dual screens was ok a year or two ago, now it seems you need to upgrade
My HD is prob okay, but for some reason my dvds on my HD arent playing smoothly, yet off my external HD my dvds play fine...strange. Ill figure it out soon, but I might as well make sure my HD is ok.
Check the DMA setting for your IDE controllers.
My computer->properties->hardware->device manager->IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Check both primary (HD) and secondary (optical) IDE channels
IDE Channel->properties->advanced settings
Transfer mode should be "DMA if available"
Current Transfer mode should be some kind of DMA mode (NOT PIO)
kevzik
08-17-2006, 05:17 PM
Hey, thanks m6oo for the guide. I checked it all, everything was already at "DMA" SO...my problem may still exsist. Really though, thanks for the help.
espy605
08-17-2006, 05:42 PM
Yeah, you might want to get a card that has 256 ram on it. 128 doing dual screens was ok a year or two ago, now it seems you need to upgrade This can't be the issue since it plays fine when he's playing from an external hard drive.
My HD is prob okay, but for some reason my dvds on my HD arent playing smoothly, yet off my external HD my dvds play fine...strange. Ill figure it out soon, but I might as well make sure my HD is ok.
It sounds that for some reason, you aren't getting the same transfer rate between your internal hard disk and your external. Try using a hard drive benchmarking program, like SiSoft Sandra (popular with Tom's Hardware users). It'll tell you how fast your hard drive is performing. Most modern hard drives should at least have a sustained read rate of 40MB/sec, which is plenty fast for DVD.
It is confusing, though, that the movie plays fine when you disable one of the monitors. It's possible that your internal hard drive is working harder when you're using two displays. If you don't have much system RAM, then Windows would have to access the paging file more frequently. If it had to do this while streaming data from a movie file, it's possible the movie file would skip periodically during intensive read/writes to the page file. Since there is no page file on your external, it wouldn't have this issue.