The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group O&O DriveLED 2.0 George Skarbek |
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O&O DriveLED 2.0 is a program that may be of interest to users who have multiple
drives and/or multiple partitions and/or network drives and would like to see
the activity on each drive. The LED that comes with your computer just shows
hard disk activity. It does not show which drive is active and shows no
indication for network or USB drives.
O&O DriveLED gives you this information as well as the temperatures of the hard
disk(s) and some diagnostics. The figure above shows my computer with two physical
drives having two and three partitions respectively, and the drive temperatures.
Drive X: is an external USB drive and drives T: and U: are network drives. The
bar below the drive shows disk capacity used.
The red colour on a drive signifies drive writes; green (not illustrated) shows
disk reads. SCSI, CD, DVD and removable USB drives are also supported.
O&O DriveLED has automatic S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting
Technology) monitoring but the reporting claims to give prognosis of the
remaining operational life of the hard disks. I believe that it does not give
definitive answers.
Figure 2 shows a huge number of corrected read errors and positioning errors.
Unfortunately, there is no real explanation anywhere as to what this means. All
that the Help text gives is: Number of corrected read errors — in other words,
errors that could be corrected internally by the hard drive.
As these errors keep increasing I e-mailed O&O in Germany and received a very
prompt reply. Unfortunately it did not provide a real answer. Below is their
reply:
It depends on the hard disk manufacturer how much Corrected read errors and how
many Positioning errors (seek) are "normal". If there are no "not corrected read
errors" it is OK.
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My other hard disk (See Figure 3) showed no errors and neither disk has ever
given any problems.
Summary
The cost of this program is US$19.95 and it may be of interest to some members.
A free trial version can be downloaded from:
http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodl/
and this will enable you to decide if drive monitoring information is of value.
Reprinted from the March 2005 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
