Stellar Data Recovery’s Stellar Drive Monitor is a useful scanning, monitoring and backup utility for the Mac. It runs in the background constantly, scanning and monitoring your hard drive to identify possible problems and issue warnings.

The software also performs a surface scan to identify bad sectors and can read SMART attributes for an overall health assessment of your drive. Stellar Data Monitor monitors drive temperature variations along with 70 other parameters to warn you about threats to hard drive health. This give you time to back-up your important data (something you should already be doing.)

The software boasts an extensive “Surface scan” to detect bad sectors on your hard disk. You have the option to view and email drive/volume performance reports. Stellar Drive Monitor also supports backups of data on available disk partitions.

What’s more, the software incorporates a Drive Performance feature to allow checking the performance levels of any selected disk or volume by the process of sequential read/write or sustained read/write. You can see the minimum, average, or maximum performance levels using a bar graph, line graph, or raw data representation.

The utility is available in a try-before-you-buy version with almost all its features available for 30 days. Stellar Drive Monitor’s single user license is available for US$29. For more info go to http://tinyurl.com/by8a535 .