StableBit Scanner 2.5.1.3062 is now available as a release final.
Get it here:
https://stablebit.com/Scanner/Download
Compared to StableBit Scanner version 2.4, this version is a massive upgrade, perhaps the biggest one we’ve done yet.
What’s New in 2.5
As the 2.5 BETA was progressing, I’ve been covered some of the new features in previous blog posts, so I won’t go into too much detail on those topics here.
Remote Control
Remote control is a way to manage your StableBit Scanner installation from another machine on your LAN. It’s fully automatic and super simple to use.
I’ve previously posted about it here.
New Notification Options
The StableBit Scanner 2.5 features a completely brand new notification system. You can receive notifications via Email, SMS, Speech, Twitter, or you can have them sent to your mobile devices (Android / iOS / Windows Phone / Windows).
You can read up on this new feature here.
Cloud Integration Enhancements
This actually took a lot of work, and is something that’s mostly invisible to the user, but I think that it was important and worth it, as it greatly improves the quality of the product as a whole.
Here’s a summary of what this means:
- First of all, thanks to an update to the engine that powers the StableBit Scanner’s unique SMART interpretation system, the StableBit Scanner now knows about more specific information about each drive model. Things such as the maximum operating temperature and drive reliability figures are now available for each drive model.
- This lets us do much more intelligent temperature control and customized overheat warnings, depending on the the use case scenario (Desktop vs Server vs Laptop, etc..). Everything is automatically configured for you, but you can tweak the settings if you want to.
- The new data also enables us to issue more intelligent SMART warnings. For example, the StableBit Scanner now knows about the maximum load cycle count, per drive model, so it uses that information to determine when to issue a warning.
- When available, the warranty period and drive reliability information are now available under Disk Details.
You can read more about these improvements here.
SSD SMART Interpretation Improvements
Since SSDs operate fundamentally differently than hard drives, the typical set of SMART interpretation rules that apply to spinning drives mostly don’t apply to SSDs. But unfortunately, instead of using one unified set of SMART attributes for all SSDs, each SSD controller manufacturer has chosen to use their own proprietary set. To make things worse, they generally refuse to publish their SMART specifications, which makes interpreting SSD SMART data correctly all that much more difficult.
But this is where the StableBit Scanner can really shine. Because our SMART interpretation rules are cloud powered, we can keep them updated with new rules as new SSDs are released, without pushing out software updates. So your SMART data can actually improve over time as our SMART interpretation rules evolve.
I am proud to say that, as of right now, the StableBit Scanner has SMART interpretation rules for every SSD that it has ever seen, and it can only get better from here. This took a lot of effort and I’d like to make a point of it.
I’d also like to thank those who have chosen to submit their SMART data to BitFlock, this helps us improve our SMART interpretation rules and makes our job a little easier.
New UI Themes
I’d categorize this as a nicety, as it doesn’t really improve the core functionality of the product, but it was requested a number of times, so here you go.
You can read a bit more about the new themes here.
StableBit Scanner 3.0
Let’s talk a bit about the future of the StableBit Scanner.
I think that the StableBit Scanner 2.X line turned out nicely and is a worthy followup to StableBit Scanner 1.0 (which ran on the original Windows Home Server). But it’s time to grow the software into something bigger.
StableBit Scanner 3.0 will be the next major release and it will add a fantastic new capability to the core scanning engine, among other features. I don’t want to talk about this yet but I can’t wait to get a BETA of this out to the public, it may just knock your socks off.
StableBit Scanner 3.0 will also feature StableBit Cloud integration. The exact specifics of the StableBit Cloud are still being fleshed out and I’ll talk about it in some detail once there’s a working prototype.
You can read some more about the StableBit Cloud and how its development is progressing on our development wiki right here:
http://wiki.covecube.com/Development_Status#StableBit_Cloud
You can also find a list of some of the other things that we’re working on right now on that wiki.
Our Next Product
Coming up next, we’ll introduce a brand new StableBit product called StableBit CloudDrive. Stablebit CloudDrive is a huge project, on the scale of Stablebit DrivePool, and has been in development since late 2013.
I’ll have a blog post ready along with some screenshots, once I have a 1.0 public BETA.