Useful hard drive "dead pool" prediction utility
Panterasoft's freeware HDD Health looks to be one of those just-the-thing utilities for getting yourself a bit of advance warning about impending trouble. According to its online help, HDD Health does its darndest to predict a probable drive failure date based a broad cross-section of S.M.A.R.T.-enabled drive parameters and their current values. Don't know from S.M.A.R.T.? It's probably on every hard drive your late model computer posesses, but you probably don't have a utility to mine the data this diagnostic system is collecting. Unless you snap to it and snag HDD Health today, that is.
Sure looks worth a try. Ad-aware says it's not given me any new spyware, so that's something. I'm gonna run it for a week on my 3 years-ancient Thinkpad and see what sort of predictions it cooks up. If I fail to blog a results follow-up, well, it's quite possible The Date is this weekend.