Ashampoo HDD Control 3 Editor's Review

Take control of the heart of your computer with this essential Windows utility.

Your hard drive is the heart of your computer.  If the CPU is the brain, then your hard drive is definitely the heart.  It pumps information throughout your PC and allows you to perform and complete tasks that can make your life a lot easier.  However, like any body, when the heart is sick, the body can't do well.  This is why you need to keep your PC's heart – your hard drive – working as well as it can. This is where applications like Ashampoo's HDD Control come in. It’s a Windows app that can help you keep your hard drive working at its best possible ability.

Ashampoo HDD Control  monitors, maintains and defragments hard drives. The software supports not only all common IDE and SATA hard drives, but also provides improved support for external USB hard drives and SSD's. The extended user interface gives an overview of the status of your hard drive's health, performance and temperature. It also offers lots of technical information on the drive's supported features and current status. The software supports S.M.A.R.T and will check for electric and mechanic problems of hard drives as well as adjustment of the noise level and power management, if supported by the drive.
With just a few clicks, HDD Control finds unused files and Internet traces, and then delete the data, with support for different erasing methods. If something goes south and you accidentally remove the wrong information from your drive, HDD Control can also help you get it back.  Once you've got the space you need, the app can also proactively defragment your drive as well.

Speaking of SSD's, HDD Control works well with Windows-based SSD's.  Its Duplicate Finder can help locate and delete duplicate files so you don't waste space on these limited volumes.  You can use its filtering mechanism to search for specific file types and extensions, to help you keep a handle on your disk usage.

App Pro’s: Unified start screen, Duplicate Finder, drive health monitoring

App Con’s: Expensive in today's app market

Conclusion: Ashampoo HDD Control bundles all of the essential information about your PC's hard drive on its start screen in a clear and concise manner. From here, you have a clear, detailed picture of the state of your drives within seconds and can take instant action of you need to.

The app's history view can show you drive's long term performance trends and allow you to predict if and when your drive may fail.  You'll be able to take the appropriate precautions in order to save your data from corruption or overall drive failure.

The app's interface is non-standard; but it’s a decent application and it does a great job of keeping an eye on your drive and its performance.  The app is a bit on the expensive side by today's prices, but if you've got a home network and have a great deal of storage on it, this could be the tool that helps you keep things running at peak performance.