Are your hard drives healthy?

I’m an Acronis True Image user and yesterday, I received an email for a new Acronis product.  It’s called Acronis Drive Monitor and its purpose is to monitor hard drive health.  The good news is that it’s free so I gave it a shot and installed it on my desktop and my server (yep, it support desktop and server Windows OS).

My server has been acting strangely recently and I suspect the main hard drive to be the culprit.  I did run the usual CHKDSK and that helped but my Spiderman senses were still telling me that something was still wrong.  Well, Drive Monitor told me exactly what was wrong by reporting the hard drive S.M.A.R.T. attributes.  Basically, my drive is getting old.  Time to pay a visit to the folks at my local MicroBytes store.

So how long do hard drives live?  I guess that the answer is the classic “It depends” but it think that 3 years is fair enough for a drive spinning 24/7.  For now on, I’ll start a hard drive labelling system sticking an expiration date on them.  Gee, if it’s good enough for milk, it must also be good for hard drives!   ;-)