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One of the biggest complaints we've had about disk utilities is the way they tend to offer all-or-nothing display options you can view data for each physical disk or each partition, but not both. Hard Disk Sentinel's compact interface is a busy affair, packed tight with colorful status and temperature displays, but in fact it's quite efficiently configured, once the eyes sort it all out. With a number of monitoring and reporting options, it can alert you to trouble with your critical storage components before failure becomes an option.
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Developers have stepped into the breach with tools such as Hard Disk Sentinel, a free utility for monitoring and analyzing the performance of terabyte-capacity hard-disk drives (HDDs) as well as the latest and fastest solid-state drives (SSDs). Windows' built-in system tools are geared toward casual users and often lack the power or features needed to keep up with the latest hardware.
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