O&O DriveLED 4: An early-warning system for hard disk crashes/h1>

This editor’s guide provides IT journalists with an overview on the latest release of O&O DriveLED. This section includes texts and full color images, suitable for downloading and incorporating into magazines, newspapers, web sites and other media resources.

With the help of S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) O&O DriveLED evaluates under Windows the information from hard drives, and warns of impending system failures which can often prevent unnecessary loss of data.

With the help of S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) O&O DriveLED evaluates under Windows the information from hard drives, and warns of impending system failures which can often prevent unnecessary loss of data. In a tray icon, the current temperature of each hard drive will be displayed. O&O DriveLED also displays the recommended maximum temperature, provided the manufacturer of the hard drive supports SMART. The status reports integrated into O&O DriveLED 4 summarize hard disk information, e.g. the state of the disk and the storage capacity.

Depending on the manufacturer, different information will be displayed for each hard disk: for example, how long the drive is already in operation, how many startups there have been since then and whether there have been corrected write errors. Using this information, the remaining life expectancy is predicted and warnings of a possible hard drive failure are issued. By taking timely action – data backups and new hardware – data loss can be avoided.

Also displayed per drive is whether and how accesses to that drive were made. In the Control Center an LED is assigned to every logical drive. The color indicates the current status of the disk (gray: no activity; green: read access; red: write access; yellow: concurrent write/read). When accessing virtual drives – such as network drives – a distinction can also be made between write and read. In the Control Center, the storage capacity of the logical drive is also displayed under the drive status.

In a tray icon, the current temperature of each hard drive will be displayed. O&O DriveLED also displays the recommended maximum temperature, provided the manufacturer of the hard drive supports SMART. An extra highlight is the choice between two different design layouts.