Cropel Hard Drive Diagnostic FAQ

I cannot install Cropel

You have to be an administrator on the PC when you are installing Cropel S.M.A.R.T. monitoring software.

To obtain S.M.A.R.T. information it is required to read data from a physical device directly. It is only possible for an account with administrator rights.

It seems that Cropel does nothing

Cropel collects and analyzes S.M.A.R.T. data once every five minutes but only displays a message in case of imminent or predicted failure. When all is well, Cropel just sits silently in the system tray.

What do the charts mean?

There are two types of charts: history charts and frequency charts. History charts represent attribute values as a function of time while frequency charts display how often the particular attribute value occurs in all the hard drives of that model.

Failure prediction - where to find and how to interpret?

Cropel Hard Drive Diagnostic software monitors hard drive health and predicts a possible disk failure based on the changes of the S.M.A.R.T. attribute values over time. Time to a failure is the estimated time after which a particular attribute value would reach the threshold, given that attribute value keeps the same trend.

There are the following possible predictions:

• no problem is displayed if time to a failure is more than a year,
• 2 - 12 months is shown if time to a failure is more than 60 days,
• 3 - 8 weeks - time to a failure is more than 20 days,
• 4 - 20 days - time to a failure is more than three days,
• imminent - time to a failure is three days or less.

Cropel tells me that the disk is going to fail right now, in two weeks or in a month, what should I do?

Backup immediately, then consider replacing a hard drive.

I cannot get statistics for my disk

This can be caused by the following:

• There is not enough statistic data on your device, e.g. you have just launched Cropel Hard Drive Diagnostic software and therefore history data has not been collected yet.
• Cropel cannot connect to the Internet to get the data, because of the network problem.

What the difference is between a free version of Cropel and a subscription?

A free version of Cropel checks disks state on a PC once every five minutes. Based on the collected data, Cropel displays S.M.A.R.T. attribute values and various charts for a selected disk. Also, Cropel shows a message about imminent disk failure, but not a failure prediction.

Subscription allows to get a disk failure prediction based on the Cropel's database.

When running, what data does Cropel collect?

Cropel Hard Drive Diagnostic software collects only S.M.A.R.T. data for a device, vendor names, models, and serial numbers of disks.