Check HD's health?

[Twigglish]

What is a good program to scan my HDD and make sure it's still in good health and whatnot?
I fear that one of my drives is going South and I'd like to find out now and not when it stops spinning altogether.

[EarthDog]

Seagate and Wester Dig I believe both have a diagnostice tool you can DL from there website. I have no idea what drive you have however..........

[Terriac]

Not sure which is the best ...

There's HD Tune Pro, which has many tests that you can run.

Ultimate boot CD has a lot of diagnostic tools. Including Seagate and WD tools ... I think everybody should have this one.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

[Mpegger]

http://www.ntfs.com/disk-monitor.htm

There are plenty of others out there, but this will allow you to visually see what attributes may be close to failing marks in the SMART log for the drive, and allow you to make a decision on whether to further test or switch out the drive soon/asap.

As Earthdog also pointed out, SG and WD, as well as other HDD manufacturers have their own diagnostic software that will test the drive as well as report back SMART status. Personally, I ignore the SMART status within those programs as they don't appear "smart" enough to tell when a drive is truly faulty. 1 drive I had to RMA was having constant CRC Errors, yet SMART reported that everything was fine even though the CRC error attribute in the SMART log itself was beyond the threshold. IMO, the HDD diagnostics software is only good enough to test for bad sectors.

That being said, you can also get the Ultimate Boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) which includes a fair number of diagnostic utilities, not only the manufacturer diagnostics, but other HDD diagnostic software as well. For some reason, I could not get any of the WD diagnostic tools to run on my test system, and had to use one of the other HDD test software include on that CD.

[Twigglish]

Seagate SeaTools is telling me everything is good. That doesn't explain why half my music is no longer recognized by media players, and any audio playback from that drive is horribly corrupt.
Thanks, Mpegger. I'll check that out.

[Twigglish]

After some re-checking, I realize playback from anything is now flawed. I don't think this is a drive issue. maybe audio drivers? I dunno.