Thinkpads Forum

Hi folks,
as already stated in the thread name, I´m looking for utility that is able to monitor / test and report HD parameters regarding HD health (like operating temperatures, bad sectors etc). I namely have some paranoid concerns about my Seagate 7200.3 due to the increased reports of failed drives of that specific type in our forum. Losing data or the ability to recover data from a (completely) failed drive would turn into a personal tragedy

Thanks

Marin


EDIT: only grammar

Download SeaTools for Windows from Seagate's official website.
Make sure SMART is enabled and make diagnostics periodically.
Just google "SMART HDD software" and you'll come up with thousands of results.

btw. I had the HDD replaced and I have no complains about the new one (well it could have been silent as the Hitachi...)

Pozdravi!

Zdrasti
Thanks for your reply, I am gonna have a look at the SeaTools tomorrow. BTW I have just found out that my Everest can read the SMART data from the drive except for 5 parameters rated as "vendor-specific". I´m curious to see what the SeaTools are going to tell me about that. I´ll then post some parameters for comparison...

Cheers

Marin


P.S: Toshe, you never sleep?

what can i say, it's the student way of life

Can everest monitor the hdd constantly, as a service, or you have to check the data manually? It would be really nice if there's a real-time monitoring program that can alert you right away if something is wrong. Apparently the SMART system is almost useless without godd piece of software.

DTemp is a very small (less than 1MB) sw that monitors the temperatures and displays them in the bar.
Plus can show all the smart values.

http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/

you guys should know that sometimes SMART monitoring will just tell you: "You're HDD has failed, OK?" which is cold comfort..

i used to monitor HDD's with SMART when IBM was making travelstar and deskstar and the deskstar were more accurately knows as "deathstar" drives..
it does no good to know your drive has died..

and from my experience at that time the drive would always report as healthy until it was unhealthy and then you are presented with a choice..
continue to use the drive to back up or wait for a new drive to copy your contents to..

its not a nice and easy choice to make..

You are right. Actually all the hds that have died here (one or maybe 2 deskstar, 2 maxtor ... in one case it was a replacement drive from the factory that died 10 minutes after being plugged...) had absolutely no benefit from the smart monitoring.

Every time except one I heard some suspicious noise... backed up... then they said byebye but during all that time for smart they were healty.

I remember there's one monitoring tool that makes statistical predictions based on the fluctuations of the smart values, to the point of saying : Day xyz the drive will fail.
With me it didn't work.. THAT hd is still working 3 years after its death sentence..... (3 years of 12 hours/day of usage)