Year by year notebook computers are replacing usual desktop PCs at work and at home. Notebooks are small and handy, but they are also much more fragile than desktops. For a number of reasons notebook hard drives are even less reliable than those of desktops. These reasons are:
Shaking. Various jolts and shakings happen frequently during notebook transportation and active work. This expedites deterioration of the mechanical parts of a hard drive.
Insufficient power supply. When powered by the battery, the notebook hard drive might not get sufficient power because of excessive battery load. In this case the hard drive will not be able to maintain constant rotation speed which increases the probability of information loss.

High temperature. Heat emission of components of modern notebooks may reach 100 watts. And all those components are located in a small area with weak cooling. In such a harsh environment hard drive temperature is often close to or even exceeds the maximum allowed value (55°C (131°F) for most hard drives). This negatively affects both mechanical (thermal expansion of the platters) and electronic (overheating and possible failure of the controller) parts of a hard drive.

That’s why notebook hard drives need constant health monitoring to prevent data loss. Such monitoring can be performed with Hard Drive Inspector Professional (HDIP). But the Professional version is intended mostly for desktop computers and doesn’t take into account some peculiar features of notebooks. For example, HDIP periodically reads S.M.A.R.T. data from a hard drive to control its health. Reading this data when the hard drive is in sleep mode activates the disk which in turn causes an unnecessary increase in power consumption and reduces battery life. In addition, the average working temperature of a notebook's hard drives is usually higher than the temperature of a desktop’s disks. So, when used in notebooks, HDIP may show false overheating alerts.

These problems led us to develop a special edition of Hard Drive Inspector intended for notebook users. Hard Drive Inspector for Notebooks has all the functionality of the Professional version, but also takes into account the specific features of notebooks listed above. This is the most powerful version of Hard Drive Inspector.

Version 3.30, build #250 September 14, 2009
+ added the support of the Silicon Image Sil 0680 IDE controller and Sil 3112/3114/3132/3512 SATA controllers
+ added the support of the Initio external drives/Lacie hard disk Neil Poulton design drives

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