Disk Health Monitor is a free Windows utility that can ease much of the hand-holding necessary in maintaining good hard drive health by monitoring and notifying the user of potential problems before they evolve into something critical – as much as possible that is. Notifications can be configured to either produce a balloon pop-up in the tray or generate an email notification, an excellent solution if you’ve got multiple computers in your environment that you aren’t the primary user of.
Configuration is sparse and limited to just the email configuration portion. Disk Health requires a Gmail account, though the configuration allows for a custom SMTP server and port so it’s possible other email accounts will work – I tested with Gmail since it was already my main platform. Complete the form fields as necessary then click Save & Start Now.
Disk Health Monitor resides in the system tray and monitors the Event Log in real-time. When keywords such as Disk, DMIO, or chkdsk are found in pairing with words such as error, corrupt, or bad block the configured notification preference will trigger.
Disk Health is an excellent utility to leverage the monitoring system already integrated within Windows. It’s compatible with all iterations of Windows including 64 bit releases – though it will require elevated rights.
