HDD health

[Mark G.]

I was curious what you guys used to monitor your HDD (hard disk) health?
Have been trying a program called Harddisk Sentinal, but not sure I am
liking it. All my disk are SMART enabled. Am running XP Pro. Thanks much.

 

[createwindow]

Dear Mark G,

I recommend the system event log in Administrative Tools (Event
Viewer). Just check that every week for Red "Disk" error messages. You
probably don't need a third party program to monitor your disk. If you
have a modern disk then failure is going to be a rare event. Keeping
it cool is the best way to keep it healthy.
The data on your disk is of course more important than just monitoring
the disk itself.

Sounds like you are keen to monitor your drive. If you have time, open
a command prompt and issue a chkdsk /r and reboot. This will check
your drive for bad clusters and attempt to recover (usually
successfully) bad data. The chkdsk command is explained in windows
help.

Hope that helps,

CreateWindow
http://mymessagetaker.com
The while-you-were-out message program you have been looking for!

 

[GHalleck]

I was curious what you guys used to monitor your HDD (hard disk) health?
Have been trying a program called Harddisk Sentinal, but not sure I am
liking it. All my disk are SMART enabled. Am running XP Pro. Thanks much.

SMART is pretty much standard for most computers these days. It is always
a good idea to check the POST screens when starting up. But one should
also have a sense of the performance of the hard drive(s) during normal
operations and be prepared to perform diagnostics whenever any doubts are
elicited.

 

[Gerry]

Mark

Try running HD Tune(freeware).

Download and run it and see what it turns up.
http://www.hdtune.com/

Select the Info tabs and place the cursor on the drive under Drive
letter and then double click the two page icon ( copy to Clipboard )
and copy into a further message.

Select the Health tab and then double click the two page icon ( copy
to Clipboard ) and copy into a further message. Also do a full surface
scan with HD Tune.

--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Tim.T]

I was once interested in my hard drive's health, but I never really
understood all the values and data collected by diagnostic programs. Instead
I just listen out for the dreaded "click of death".

Tim