The purpose of HDD Guardian is to provide a graphical interface to smartctl, part of the S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools, in order to make this nice utility accessible to all Windows users.

Features:

automatic translation (if language files doesn't exist, it automatically loads english). Available languages: english, italian and hungarian;

easy device overview, with temperature, last test result, overall health and bad sectors; displays an optional icon into the tray area for each fixed device;

HDD Guardian tray icons change shield color if a device is failing;

automatically export smartctl output into a specified folder;

monitor virtual devices loaded from a shared smartctl output;

displays device identity information;

perform self-test and displays their results;

allow enabling/disabling S.M.A.R.T., automatic offline data collection (an automatic test performed by device every four hours) and autosave of vendor-specific attributes;

displays attributes, information, and graphs;

displays device capabilities;

displays device error log;

allows you to set device-specific tolerance, attribute format and firmware debugs;

allows you to set warning behaviour;

allows you to monitor SSDs life percentage;

allows you to monitor external devices (requires administrative rights).

Limitations: Do not use HDD Guardian with Samsung HD155UI and HD204UI without the vendor provided patch! Read more or get the patch here