Knowing the status of your hard drive is a great way to prepare for problems that may potentially arise. And thank to CrystalDiskInfo obtaining this information from your hard drive couldn't be any easier.

CrystalDisk will gather data from your hard drive and will let you know its current temperature, the number of power cycles and even the number of hours the drive has been on. All this information comes in handy when trying to determine the root of a system crash or data failure, especially when you're dealing with an older drive in a crowded system case where cooling may not be optimal.

In our testing, the program was very easy to use and recognized our drive right away. Fortunately for us, we had no issues but if we did, we had no doubt that CrystalDisk would alert us to the problem so that appropriate steps could be taken.

CrystalDisk is a free application available for Windows and is a bit of a must have tool in diagnosing hard drive errors.