What is SIGuardian?

SIGuardian is a small, but very useful utility for controlling the health status of your hard disks. SIGuardian can discover a probable hard disk drive (HDD) fail BEFORE it actually occurs. In regular usage, SIGuardian can calculate the nearest possible date of hard disk fail.

How does it work? SIGuardian uses S.M.A.R.T. technology, included in all modern hard disks. S.M.A.R.T. is an HDD self-testing and monitoring technology described in detail here. Simplified, it looks like the HDD is continuously making self-tests and calculating some “attributes”, which reflect the current state of efficiency and status of the HDD. Each attribute means some detail in HDD status – total hours of work, count of read errors, and others. If after a self-test, the HDD "thinks" that its state is changed, it changes the value of the corresponding attribute. For example, if the time of spin-up from idle state changed, the HDD would change (lower) the value of the "Spin-Up Time" attribute. Each attribute has a threshold (lower) value and, at achievement, the HDD may stop working.

SIGuardian monitors attribute changes, analyzes speed of falling (lowering), and calculates remaining time of life HDD based on this data.

Furthermore, SIGuardian shows other useful information about your HDD - supported standards, speed modes of operation, current mode of operation (PIO, DMA, UDMA&ldots;), and others. Detailed info about these modes can be found under "HDD technology".