Collect HDD/SDD Serial Number
I read that in future releases PDQ Inventory might include the ability to report S.M.A.R.T drive status, this will be HUGE for us, as I'm currently looking into predictive maintenance for our end user's PC's. One more tool for the belt!
But one big request this year, mostly from the legal team, is the ability to audit, record, and track hard drive serial numbers in our machines.
If we were to deploy 10 PC's to end users, and they, through no acknowledgement of the IT decide to swap hard drives, we'd like to know about it. OR a user leaves the organization with malicious intent, we could track the Laptop Service Tag to the Hard Drive Serial from the day they received the machine, that way after a forensic image or with the physical drive we can hand it off and be done with it. No guessing games.
Comments
Hi Martin,
PDQ Inventory does collect HDD serial numbers both for physical and logical drives. We don't maintain historical data so if a disk was swapped it would just show up on another computer's inventory. You could create Custom Fields for each computer to list the initial HDD serial number and then you'd be able to compare what was initially entered (in custom fields) vs. the current serial number as shown under Disk Drives.
The only problem with a user editable (custom) field is that it would be user editable. Fat-fingers and accountability of the IT Team could cause doubt in the event we need to verify records. I see the Physical/Logical serial, I guess the question of this audit history gets into a deeper conversation of what else can be logged against an asset (Software changes, etc). This way an IT Manager can see when an asset had a hardware/software/setting change.