Checking a hard drives health - what you do?

[Technique]

Just a curiosity thing to be honest after I had a hard drive issue recently which some of you helped out on on another thread. Just to see what you guys do with your drives.

 

Now obviously various drives will come with various warranties & I understand that warranties are not guarantees - and as such there's no substitute for an appropriate backup setup.

 

So say your drive has a 2 or a 3yr warranty or whatever it may come with. You're backing it up like I wasn't you should be doing but that warranty period ends. Do you periodically check on the health of that drive? What software do you use? How often do you check?

Once again - you're backing up your data anyway so this isn't about backing up. I guess it's about looking for signs that the drive is on its way out.

 

Now when I had my hard drive issue, I was told about running disk scanning software on it & not just using CrystalDiskInfo.

 

So an additional question would be - these checks that you may or may not be doing, how long do they actually take to complete? I know this is variable as a 1TB drive should be quicker than an 8TB drive.

 

Is it even worthwhile running this kind of software? Or do you guys just keep going until it dies-dies & then bin it and replace because who cares - you've backed it up anyway?

[+BudMan MVC]

I have been using drive scanner from stablebit for many years.. Keep an eye on your disks for you.. And warns of pending problems, and if your also using it with their drive pool software it can auto move files off a drive in the pool that is showing signs of failure.

 

https://stablebit.com/Scanner

[+Warwagon MVC]

I use https://www.hdsentinel.com/ on my Windows file server and QuickBooks laptop. I also have email notifications turned on.