Ashampoo HDD Control 2017

Ashampoo HDD Control 3 keeps tabs on your computer's hard drive, including solid-state drives, logical drives, and removable and network drives. It cleans and defragments drives, erases online tracks, securely deletes files, and even undeletes some files. It monitors power-on count, disk temperature, and other conditions and issues alerts at specified thresholds. It's compatible with S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology), Automatic Acoustic Management, and Advanced Power Management.

Pros

Tests: HDD Control 3 can run benchmarking tests, regular and extended S.M.A.R.T. tests, and disk surface tests.

SSD wizard: HDD Control 3's SSD optimization wizard tweaks everything from TRIM to disabling boot-time defragmentation.

Duplicate finder: The built-in Duplicate Finder is a great addition. The Disk Space Explorer, File Wiper, and Undeleter also earn their keep.

Cons

Layout options: The disk tabs are satisfactory, but we'd like the option of a more traditional list view, especially in shareware.

Not a disk or partition manager: While HDD Control 3 can analyze and maintain your disks, it isn't a partition manager or a total disk backup solution -- nor does it pretend to be.

Bottom Line

Ashampoo's HDD Control 3 doesn't reformat disks or move partitions, but it provides decent protection. We'd like to see customizable views, but that's a minor point. HDD Control 3 earns it keep by helping prevent catastrophic (and far more expensive) disk failure and data loss.

Editors' note: This is a review of the full version of Ashampoo HDD Control 3. The trial version is limited to 10 days.