The Ashampoo HDD Control software performs hard disk maintenance for you. This involves taking measures to prevent potential failures and crashes before they occur. The software supports all commonly available IDE and serial ATA drives. Based on the type of drive in use, Ashampoo HDD Control provides the user with all important facts and information, including the drive serial number, firmware version, cache size, number of configured partitions, drive space and current temperature. As the number of signs indicating that the drive could soon potentially fail begins to mount, the background guard signals an alarm. For this reason, it is easy to understand why the computer takes longer to read the file, since it first of all needs to locate and assemble all the separate fragments.