Acronis Drive Monitor, Monitor Hard Drives For Critical Events

Keeping an eye on the hard drives of a computer system ensures to receive notifications about imminent drive errors or other critical events that may affect the data on those devices. Modern hard drives usually support the SMART technology, which software can use to display information about a drive’s health.

Acronis Drive Monitor is a free hard disk monitoring software that uses SMART information and the Windows event log to display important events to the system user. The program is pretty basic, which is surprising considering its size of nearly 18 Megabytes.

On startup a summary is displayed, which displays disk problems, backup information and critical events. Disk problems are directly linked to SMART parameters, and the program will either report that all disks are working normally, or that problems have been encountered.

acronis drive monitor

Critical events taps right into the Windows event log and displays high risk events of the system’s storage devices. Backup finally has probably been added to distribute or sell Acronis products as it proposes to download Acronis backup software if no backup software is detected on the system.

Links lead to detailed information about each of the information provided by the software. Probably the most interesting feature of the program is the critical events listing which makes use of the Windows Event log. Not many hard drive monitoring applications offer this feature.

Then again, it is possible to create those custom alerts quite easily without third party software.

The page displays all critical events, sorted by date. Included in the listing is the risk evaluation rating, severity, source and event id. A double-click on an event displays detailed information about that specific event, with a link to the Acronis Knowledge Base website for additional information.

critical events

The Disks page lists the usual information about the primary partition of the computer. We did not find an option to make the drive monitor display those information for other connected drives.

Finally, the program can create four types of alerts that are send to an email address that needs to be configured in the program’s options. Alerts can be configured for temperature levels, critical events, disks monitoring errors and backup monitoring errors.

Acronis Drive Monitor does not offer anything that other tools or even Windows first party tools do not offer. Some users may still be inclined to give the program a try, it is free after all. The program supports both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. Downloads are provided at the Acronis website after registration.