Drive Health?

J

jcovarrubiasu

n00b
Joined
Apr 9, 2007
Messages
44
What is the best software avaiable to watch your drive health? I don't want to be surprised by loosing all my data because my hard drive crashed....so, I've heard of a few programs that they can help you watch your S.M.A.R.T values. But Now I am looking for alternatives.

Thanks.

p.s
 
Drive crashes are just about impossible to predict.
SMART helps, but it's not always reliable.
CHKSK helps, but see above.

The best solution? Backups. There is no substitution for having a regular active backup routine.

There are lots of options from disk imaging to simple file copies.
I use a combination of both and I really like Cobian Backup and Karen's Replicator for file backups, and Drivesnapshot for disk images. Other image solutions from paragon or acronis may be a better fit for recovery efforts. Recovering an active partition with drivesnapshot takes a lot of careful planning.
 
drizzt81 said:
Google's HDD study mentioned that SMART is pretty much useless at predicting drive failures.
Click to expand...

Well, sort of. As I read it, if SMART says there's a problem in certain areas, then the disk is probably bound for failure. But just because SMART reports no problems doesn't mean there are none. So SMART reporting failure implies disk failure, but disk failure does not imply SMART reporting failure. So SMART is still a good thing to check - if it says the disk is having problems, replace it! - but even if it doesn't show problems, the disk might still die.

In short, keep backups :p
 
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