My roommate in college was a bit of a metalhead. Metallica, Deliverance, Pantera, etc.
I rarely hear that type of sound anymore unless it is coming from a failing hard drive.
I have a stack of hard drives just a few feet away from me. They are drives that have been ripped from dead computers and most will serve as little more than paper weights and decorations, but there are some good drives.
The problem comes when you have a hard drive you rely on and it fails on you. That is why I have installed HDD Health, which is freeware from Panterasoft (sounds better than Metallicasoft), to monitor my hard drives. I cannot say how well it has worked since all my drives seem to be doing well, but I have installed it.
HDD Health is a full-featured failure-prediction agent for machines using Windows 95, 98, NT, Me, 2000 and XP. Sitting in the system tray, it monitors hard disks and alerts you to impending failure. The program uses Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) built into all new hard disks, and can predict failures on your hard drives. A host of alerting features include email, local pop-up messages, net messages, and event logging, while using no system resources.
If you rely on a hard drive it should be at least mirrored IMO so a failure means no downtime.
Our important drives are backed-up to easily removable drives (we have a huge hurricane target on us here in Florida) and mirrored. The last drive failure was fortunately just a minor annoyance and we have hot-swappable spares on hand (and cold-swappable power supplies for the UserFriendly.org fans
)
I do see a potential problem with this monitoring software, it is making me a bit paranoid whenever a minor issue is recorded.
yeah, I use HDH at work, it’s actually good when you believe you have a failing harddrive.