Hard drive failure can be very, very painful. Since hard drives are generally reliable, many computer users have never experienced failure. But, for the rest of us who have had a drive crap out on us, we know it to be an event as horrific as a catastrophic earthquake. However, the difference between earthquakes and hard drive failure is that hard drive failure is often predictable.

If you’ve ever looked at the feature list of your hard disk, one of the items listed will be “S.M.A.R.T.”. No, that doesn’t mean that your hard disk is super intelligent. S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (Wikipedia article for more info). Basically, it’s a monitoring system built-in to your drive which detects and reports on it’s condition.

In order to read the S.M.A.R.T. report off your drive, you’ll need to download and run a small piece of software. I use a free, open-source tool called smartmontools. To download the Windows installer, click here.

1) Run the installer program. (For platforms other than Windows, read the appropriate steps for your OS)
2) Open up a command prompt (Start|Run|type in ‘cmd’|OK) and change directory to where you installed smartmontools (e.g. ‘cd “Program Files”\smartmontools’)
3) To get a health check on your primary disk, run smartctl -H /dev/hda. If you see PASSED you’re in good shape. If you see FAILED, the time to start panicking is NOW! Create a backup asap and go get a new disk because you’ll be needing it very soon.

If you want to give your drive a thorough check-up, follow the steps outlined here (Scroll down to the “SMART Testing” section). Running the full battery of tests takes about 30 minutes and does not interfere with your use of the computer.

It’s a very good idea to run this test periodically, say once a week or so. It takes almost no time at all and the potential benefit in time and data can be priceless.