Is there hard drive checker software?

[Rob94hawk]

I think my hard drive may be crapping out because my rig is running really slow. It's taking a while to start up programs so is there software to check and see if a hard drive is crapping out or not? Thanx

 

[fromeo85]

HDTune is the only thing I can think of.

But I am not sure that will do what you are looking for. Worse comes to worse, back up everything before it does crap out and RMA it because most HDD manufacturer have a pretty good warranty, usually at least 3 years.

 

[Yoda4561]

There are benchmark programs, s.m.a.r.t. monitoring software, and scanning/recovery programs like spinrite. You can find the first two for free online, any sort off recovery software usually costs money.

Edit: Your drive is probably fine. Usually when hard drives go bad they display obvious behavior, like being unable to boot, corrupted files, odd grinding noises, etc. Vista's auto-defragmenter does a pretty good job on it's own, so it's probably not fragmentation. Diskeeper 2009 trialware is free and will take care of any fragmentation issues, just in case.

 

[equate975]

I use the disk monitor tools by Active@ free and works good.