When a hard disk crashes, it takes a large chunk of the user's digital life. Ashampoo HOD Control keeps a check on your hard drive with three functions-hard disk monitor, fitness test and drive cleaner. Unfortunately the package lacks a good data backup tool which would have been useful. The health reporting tool is user-friendly with colored symbols and percentage bars which display the performance and condition of the drive at a glance.

In our test, it worked perfectly even with eSATA drives. Only external USB hard disks didn't show any results via SMART. The SMART report displays and clearly explains parameters such as the drive temperature and spin retry count. The program can also clean temporary files and Internet cache.

The integrated defrag tool is quick but not great for special functions such as defragmenting the pagefile.

VERDICT: A nifty HDD monitoring tool.

FOR: Clean user interface.

AGAINST: Average defrag function.

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