HDDler

HDDler is a cross-platform software utility designed to monitor, diagnose, and manage hard disk drives and solid-state drives. It provides a unified view of disk health and performance, supporting both consumer and server environments. The project emphasizes accessibility, offering a command-line interface and an optional graphical frontend.

HDDler collects SMART attributes from drives, interprets them into a health score, and monitors temperatures and error logs. It can perform quick surface scans to detect bad sectors, run lightweight benchmarks to assess read/write performance, and generate reports suitable for IT documentation. It also includes basic disk maintenance tasks such as secure erase and cloning helpers through extensible plugins.

Architecture and licensing: The tool uses a modular core with language bindings and a plugin API, enabling extensions for additional drive types or file systems. It is released as an open-source project under a permissive license and is maintained in a public repository with community contributions.

History and impact: The initial release was in 2017 by a collaborative group of developers aiming to simplify disk health reporting. Over time, HDDler gained adoption among system administrators, technicians, and hobbyists for proactive maintenance, incident response, and capacity planning. It is commonly used in mixed environments with SSDs and HDDs.

See also: SMART, disk health monitoring, disk benchmarking.