Topic: Monitor your harddisk !

[Doc Nyar]

Active Smart is a tool that helps you monitor your harddrive. You are able to download this trial version. Designers claim it can predict if and when your harddrive fails. Data can be recovered from a dailing harddrive. Worth a try I would say.

[Riqtam]

Let's say it has predicted an HD failure, does the software offer tools to prevent it?

[gryphon]

The only thing it could do I suppose is backing up something just in time. . although unlikly.
With every hardware failure. . . software can't prevent it. . just minimise the damage.

Monitoring tools are generally ment to monitor things, not to prevent the failure itself.

[Doc Nyar]

Indeed, it will not prevent the hardware failure from happening, but it'll warn you (in time) for you to back things up..

[number6]

Since the falure is a physical (mechanical) problem it is impossible to fix with software alone. It would be nice if the disk manufacturers made a self repairing disk, but it's probably not practical.

[gryphon]

Think that's why they invented RAID arrays for harddrives

wasn't there an article about self repairing chips or something on Slashdot a few weeks ago ?

[number6]

I have seen RAID disks crash and burn. I think they keep the redundant data so that if you lose a disk you don't lose any data, just the hardware.

[gryphon]

yea, it's ment as a backup if just 1 or 2 disks fail. . . hardware will still be gone. And if all the disk would crash you still havn't got any option to get it back [ non extra one then with a non-RAID array ]. So if you would loose 2 out of 3 disks even RAID is useless ...

[Riqtam]

 
This stuff is for professional ppl...

[gryphon]

you mean RAID ?

There are some motherboards for home use [ game use really ] that have it build in.