Tentacle Software announced the release of their updated Disk Management Add-In this weekend and I spent an evening in “hard drive information overload” as I reviewed this sweet update to an already cool tool!
Background
I am excited to review the new Disk Management Add-In 1.1! Last year I wrote a couple of articles about the current version of the Disk Management Add-In. Since then I have been running that 1.0.9.8 version with no issues and excellent performance.
Those prior articles can be found at:
Why Do You Need Disk Management 1.1?
The standard WHS console does its job of telling you how much space you are using for Shared Folders, PC Backups and System space but was not designed to give you all of the data you really need to successfully manage your added hard drives. This picture below shows the extent of information you get from the console about your installed drives.
Disk Management 1.1
Tentacle Software knows there is more to managing your hard drives! Tentacle Software has just announced the release of their new version of the Disk Management Add-In.
The improvements in this version they list on their website are:
- Significantly improved user interface (including a collapsible pane for the wireframe if you don’t use it)
- Significantly improved performance, especially on multi-core CPUs
- Charts for disk space statistics
- Charts for disk space utilization over time
- Disk statistics logging to a file
- More disk details, including the NTFS mount point for each disk
- Real counting of the actual backup database size (for all you crazy kids with backup duplication enabled)
- A detailed help file
This new version of the Add-In will no longer be free but is well worth the $10!
Please check out their new website at http://www.tentaclesoftware.com/
Equipment Needed
- Windows Home Server
- Add-In from http://www.tentaclesoftware.com/products/whs/diskmanagement
- 30 Day trial or $10
- One beer (Optional as always)
Installation of the Disk Management Add-In 1.1 Video
No screenshots this time around. Make sure you watch the video in 720p!
Disk Management Add-In 1.1 Overview
This 11 minute video shows you most of the features of the Disk Management 1.1 Add-In.
Custom Wireframes
If you choose not to build your own Wireframe you can download premade frames from the links on the Tentacle website at:
http://www.tentaclesoftware.com/items/diskmanagement/wireframes
Once you download, use the Import function in the Settings of WHS.
Conclusion
Is this Add-In for me? Heck yeah. My parents? Not so much. This Add-In is well worth the $10 for any avid WHS user. Access to the disk temperatures, serial numbers and drive models are worth the money in time-savings alone. I no longer have to take pictures of my serial numbers on the drive labels!
The drive details and new drive space charts are also a great addition to this version.
In the future I would like to see FAST data incorporated into future versions and maybe even a tab that shows CPU temps and fan controls for non-HP WHS builds.
Thank you Sam and Tentacle Software for a great Add-In.
See you next Friday night,
Timothy Daleo
Or you could use PowerShell and run for example (to get serials)
get-wmiobject win32_diskdrive | foreach {$_.Model + ", " + $_.SerialNumber}
and a whole lot more.
Excellent videos – thanks Tim 🙂
Andrew