One of the most costly IT headaches occurs when a hard drive crashes. The downtime and lost data can be catastrophic for the employee; getting a system up and running can be a time sink for the technician. Executive Software's DiskAlert watches for subtle signs of an impending disk failure and warns your IT help desk before it's too late.

DiskAlert is available only for Microsoft Windows 2000 and NT. The DiskAlert Administrator portion of the package is a Microsoft Management Console snap-in that controls and monitors one or more DiskAlert Agents, which reside on the client PCs. Installation takes only a few minutes per PC. Agents are added and removed through the Administrator console, so you don't need to visit each PC to install it. A third module, DiskAlert Assistant, can be installed on selected client PCs. Assistant works just like Administrator but lacks Administrator's notification and remote installation options.

Once installed, DiskAlert Agents runs invisibly on client PCs, monitoring disk drives and watching for problems. When a problem arises, the Agent sends a message to the Administrator, which in turn notifies the system administrator.

Before a hard drive goes bad, it typically provides slower and slower throughput with an increased frequency of read errors. The software monitors the drive's throughput and disk error rate and reports any anomalies to the Administrator. By alerting you of the impending failure, you have time to back up the data and replace the drive.

DiskAlert works with virtually any type of disk drive, including IDE, SCSI, and RAID drive arrays. You can tailor the event triggers to your needs. You get four notification options: e-mail, pager, telephone, and pop-up messages. The pager and telephone options require a modem attached to the Administrator; the telephone method plays you a prerecorded WAV file.

We installed the product on six Windows 2000 servers and client PCs on a small office LAN and left it running for a month. We didn't encounter any drive failures, but we did get warned about several nearly full client PC drives. Given the high cost of drive replacement and lost data, this may be money well spent.