Looking for a hdd failure monitoring program

I currently have a hitachi deskstar and from reviews online, this thing probably won't last that long so I need a good program that will warn me when the hdd is most likely to fail. I don't care if I have to buy it if I could save my information from destruction or until I bother to buy a backup drive. Right now, I have SMART defender (was free from hitachi).

Uh, buy a backup drive. Drives often fail with no prior warning. The best signs of an about-to-fail hard drive are bad sectors, system slowdown, or increased noise from the drive. There isn't really a way to predict when a drive will fail.

I don't think you have much to worry about (any more than with any other brand of drive anyway). The notorious "Deathstar" reliability problems were restricted to a very small number of models.

>>1
You're looking for a SMART utility. SMART will likely predict HD failures. I think I saw a simple Windows application, HDD Health, that will let you know.

Speedfan is capable of accessing hdd SMART data, so is hdtune to name a few. Just knowing the status of your drive might not be enough to know when it's going to fail though, because sometimes they just go out suddenly for no apparent reason.

hey,  think my drive may be failing. would explorer not running right and constantly having to re-instal programs daily a sign? or do i have a virus? thanks

>>6
Chances are that you are using Internet Explorer. Don't do that. MSIE sucks. Format.

Then use Firefox.

>>7
IE isnt whats wrong, ive been a firefox guy since 0.8, im talking about the file browser Explorer.exe i formatted about a  week ago, and within 2 days all the problems i had before the format re-appeared. (i even took the time to do a full format rather then a quick format)

>>8
Be sure you have the latest Service Pack, this is important for modern controllers. Then try running AVG, Spybot and Ad-aware all three with updated patterns. If nothing found, try a HD diagnostic utility that will try every sector of your drive. You can find free tools from your HD vendor. Also try using the computer without installing anything, and see if something gets corrupted.