Hard-drive diagnostic program

On 9/5/2012 2:51 AM, Tothwolf wrote: I've just recently had SMART catch an impending failure. I use diskcheckup (not too horrible, for windows) and smartmontools + GSmartControl on ubuntu. Both will email you with problems. smartmontools on linux is really nice. For general admin purposes, gsmartcontrol(as a front end to smt) is good. For regular scheduling of automated tests, running smartd(part of smartmon) all the time with a config file is working out nicely. Drives have what are called "pre-failure" attributes, and if the values of those attributes exceed the threshold, then the drive is considered to be failing. The drive manufacturer will (generally) honor the warranty if THEIR smart utilities confirm the failure. A 1TB seagate (7200.11) failed with a Reallocated Sector Count(4153!!). It was also indicating some Offline Uncorrectables. Seagate's utility offered up a defect verification code (or whatever it is called) and off to seagate. They replaced it, although their rma process was SLOW SLOW SLOW. I managed to copy all the data off successfully, but it started making some physical noises during the copy --- further confirming(to me anyways) that it was on it's way out. SMART isn't perfect, and is definitely not a replacement for good backups, but it's better than nothing. Keith