# Hard Disk Sentinel

Hard Disk Sentinel (HDSentinel) is a computer hard disk drive-monitoring software for Windows, Linux and DOS operating systems.

## History

Hard Disk Sentinel was founded and first released in 2005, developed by Heartfelt Development Services, based in Urhida, Hungary, with János Máthé as the company's CEO. The first version of Hard Disk Sentinel for Windows released on 1 November 2005.
In 2007, version 2.00 released with supporting USB drives along with free trial (unregistered) version, Hard Disk Sentinel standard (paid version with basic disk monitoring) and Hard Disk Sentinel Professional (paid version with alerts, detailed reports, tests). Since 2009, with version 3.00, Hard Disk Sentinel supports numerous RAID controllers, by detection of hard disk status in RAID configurations and disk surface testing.
Since 2012, with version 4.00, Hard Disk Sentinel Pro Portable version is available, working without installation.
In 2017, Version 5.00 released with Disk Repair functionality and Network Attached Storage (NAS) monitoring, export status in XML and WMI. This allows creating third-party applications/add-ons to work together with Hard Disk Sentinel—integration with NagiOS, for example.
Version 6.10 included a more graphic interface on par with Windows 11 as well as supports quick disk repairing, additional warnings and statuses display. This version focused on some changes in favour of detecting more problems before they are able to cause data loss.
Version 6.20 included new alert options, and added the ability to define custom threshold limits of any S.M.A.R.T attribute (when Value or Data field is lower, lower or equal, higher, higher or equal, equal or not equal compared to configured threshold). Also included surface test functions that can be used on non-standard sector sizes of SAS 4Kn drives.
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The software is designed to find, test, diagnose and repair hard disk drives, reveal problems, display health and avoid failures by using S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) function of hard disk drives. The detected information can be saved to file in formats such as HTML, text, or XML.
Hard Disk Sentinel has the capability to function for both internal hard disks and external hard disks as well as hybrid disk drives (SSHD), SSDs, NAS and RAID arrays within the same software.

## DOS version

In 2008, Hard Disk Sentinel DOS version was released in different formats on bootable pen drive, CD, floppy. Usable when no operating system installed (or if the system is not bootable otherwise) to detect and display temperature, health status of IDE, SATA hard disk drives and with limited AHCI controller support. However, the dark side to the DOS version of Hard Disk Sentinel is that it is very limited as it will only work in older computers that support legacy boot, and can only be used to check the health of the Hard Disk. Hard Disk Sentinel DOS version does not allow you to run disk tests and repairs.

## Linux version

In 2008, Hard Disk Sentinel Linux version released, a command-line console tool detection and showing disk status with limited support of RAID configuration and SSDs in addition to hard disk status detection. The Linux version is available on x86, x64 and Raspberry Pi, ARMv5 platforms.
Since 30 August 2017, the Linux version supports industrial SD cards too and can be used with NAS devices. The Linux version has no graphical user interface, although extensions created to simplify usage under Linux.
In the Linux version of Hard Disk Sentinel, it still is limited like the DOS version. The Linux version can only be used in the Linux Terminal, and it also does not allow you to run any disk tests are repairs. You can also save the disk report as an HTML file to get a readable format.
There is also a GUI version, but functionally it is very limited with its primary purpose is to check if the HDD health is good and that's about it.