Any good HD monitoring apps?

[essential]

Are there any good progs that can scan your HDs and tell you their health status? I used to have norton disk doctor on an old computer, but lost it when I upgraded and don't feel like installing the entire SystemWorks package just for that. I'm assuming there has to be some kind of stand alone program somewhere. I looked around the net and came across a few, but have no idea which would be better than another. Any suggestions?


Thanks.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

i have used Everest to check if a suspicious HD was throwing SMART errors (it was)/

google it, its free

 

[Nothinman]

I can't believe Windows doesn't come with any SMART monitoring software by now. It's not like it's something new, SCSI drives have supported it as long as I can remember and most IDE drives produced in the last 10-15 years have too.

 

[Daaavo]

I use Hard Drive Inspector and really like it.

 

[Nothinman]

I use Hard Drive Inspector and really like it.

$30 for something that the OS should be doing for you? Nice.

 

[Daaavo]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I use Hard Drive Inspector and really like it.

$30 for something that the OS should be doing for you? Nice.

1) $30 for a very useful program is a drop in the bucket on what I would spend if my harddrive crashed (inbetween the backups I do, of course).

2) AFAIK, no OS ever, in the history of OS's has had this feature integrated. So saying that it should be included, is like saying that antivirus/spyware software should be included. It's wishful thinking at best. Although, SP2 with Giant's anti-spyware is a step in the right direction.

Out of curiosity, do you know if Longhorn is going to have s.m.a.r.t. reporting?

 

[Nothinman]

1) $30 for a very useful program is a drop in the bucket on what I would spend if my harddrive crashed (inbetween the backups I do, of course).

Depends on what all you have to replace, usually replacing the drive itself is free and as long as you do have backups replacing any data is free.

2) AFAIK, no OS ever, in the history of OS's has had this feature integrated. So saying that it should be included, is like saying that antivirus/spyware software should be included. It's wishful thinking at best. Although, SP2 with Giant's anti-spyware is a step in the right direction.

It's not integrated into the Linux kernel, but smartmontools is free in all senses of the word and runs on most OSes, including Windows. It's not as pretty as the tool you mentioned, but who cares? Something like this should run as a daemon/service and only be visible when there's a problem to report.