Useful or "Smoke and Mirrors" is a matter of environment. Just taking the DriveX major categories:
- System Information — for an individual relatively pointless, but in a corporate or academic environment where there are lots of different machines this could be invaluable for record keeping purposes.
- ### DRIVE 1 OF 1 ### — In either the individual or organizational situation the identification section is at least interesting and contains data that can be difficult to ferret out
- === DEVICE CAPABILITIES === — not particularly useful to most users
- === CURRENT POWER CYCLE STATISTICS === — an indicator of age but without MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) data not particularly informative, but as long as the data is collected it doesn't hurt to report it.
- === PROBLEMS SUMMARY === — ie. is the drive well on its way to failure or has it already failed.
- === IMPORTANT HEALTH INDICATORS === — pre-failure indicators
- === TEMPERATURE INFORMATION (CELSIUS) === — Heat was once thought to be a major factor in hard drive failure, but the famous Google study pretty well discounted that theory. I have no idea if there is even any data for SSDs. I wouldn't pay too much attention to this unless you were seeing consistently high temperatures which could be an indicator of ventilation problems in the device, fan failure, bearing failure in a rotating rust drive, or a replacement drive that is not properly sized for the computer.
- === DRIVE HEALTH INDICATORS === — at least half of this information has already been directly reported previously and the rest at least alluded to in the Problems Summary
- === DRIVE ERROR LOG === — Details of previously reported numbers
- === DRIVE SELF-TEST LOG === — Could be useful
CONCLUSION: For the individual user the meat of this report is contained in Problems Summary and Important Health Indicators which are repeated in Drive Health Indicators. The rest might be useful to some people in specific situations or would fit into the
nice to know category.
I admit to being prejudiced, but I find Drive Scope's display significantly clearer and more understandable for the mythical average user. But that may be because I am used to it and originally got it to beta test.
