With the arrival of 2013 (which strangely was never meant to happen with the end of the world and all), we have already had a number of releases which contained both bug fixes and new features. That said, the next release has a few surprises… some of which I won’t go into here, but there is one that we are very excited about.
Late last year we introduced S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, this new feature has added an extra dimension to Drive Bender’s capabilities, giving the user real-time feedback on the health of their hard drives. The downside to such a feature is that is requires a great deal of targeted development, and given the plans we have for 2013, I had some concerns with how we could devote the time needed to really polish this feature.
During the initial development phase, we needed a reference S.M.A.R.T. application that we could use to verify our own S.M.A.R.T. data, for this we used what many consider to be the best S.M.A.R.T. app in the business, Hard Disk Sentinel… and as it turned out, so did many of our beta testers. Well that got me thinking, why re-invent the wheel? So we approached the people at Hard Disk Sentinel… the end result is that the next release of Drive Bender will have its S.M.A.R.T. feature powered by the Hard Disk Sentinel engine, bring the best in class pooling and S.M.A.R.T. applications together. Furthermore we will also be offering a 25% discount to licensed Drive Bender users wanting to upgrade to the full version of Hard Disk Sentinel Professional. For more information on Hard Disk Sentinel, head to www.hdsentinel.com.
When is all this happening I hear you ask? Well we have been working on this since late last year so we have most of the technical stuff sorted… the initial beta using the Hard Disk Sentinel engine is scheduled for the first week in February, and given that we are not expecting a long beta cycle, the full release should hit soon after.