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5 out of 5 people found this review helpful
1 stars
Version: HD Workbench 1.1.31
"Too unprofessional"
Summary: I dislike this program. It could be good -- but the author(s) should really try to take their time before putting out a program like this. My problems:
(1) Does not support RAID. At all. It doesn't even have error checking for RAID. When it encountered my RAID array, it said it was a 160GB disk (actually, it's 2 80s on a RAID 0). When I tried to do anything on that "160GB disk" it failed to do anything, which somewhat makes sense. I don't think you can go about getting SMART data from something that doesn't exist...
(2) Far too little information. The toolbars are too small and esoteric, and there's one major flaw: When running a test, or something -- when you click on a utility to run, it starts running it. For example, when trying to get the status of the disk, it runs it. Is that okay? Yes and no. It's nice that it gets started on the test right away, but it would be nice to have a bit more information. All I'm asking for is a little box that says "analyzing disk...please wait." Twice I almost closed the program forcibly because I thought it locked up....
(3) Difficult to interpret data. I'm a professional computer technician, and even I had some trouble interpreting the data. Granted, I did know what it meant, but it was difficult to get to the data in the first place, and certainly anyone without experience in hardware diagnosis would find most of the data incomprehensible and unusable.
Final recommendation? Don't use it unless you need specific data, such as one parameter from the SMART information -- and don't even think about using this on a RAID array. Much easier to use, and far more useful is "Drive Fitness Test" (DFT), which doesn't give you the specifics of SMART data, but does analyze it to determine if the drive is likely to fail and then reports back.
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