What HDD maintenance programs do you use?

dalchina said:

And does that mean no need for monitoring of SSDs - I wonder? Seems still valuable - E.g.
Do solid state hard drives fail suddenly, or do they fail at a gradual rate? - Quora
5 Warning Signs Your SSD Is About to Break Down and Fail
Symptoms of Impending SSD / Hard Drive Failure - HardBoiled

Looks like interesting reads thanks. I think there is just more piece of mind with stuff being stored on SSD these day's but maybe I'm wrong. In my experience mechanical HDD's don't live long lives...

dalchina said:

And does that mean no need for monitoring of SSDs - I wonder? Seems still valuable.

Well, they are very reliable. However, like any storage device, they will fail in time. All depends on the design of the NAND and the Controller.
For example, if I need only 500 GB and I buy a 1 TB SSD, it will have more cells available to re-allocate versus using the same cells over and over again in the 500 GB.

Here's a good link -

SSD life - solid state drives health and endurance monitoring

Also -

Best 10 Free Tools to Check SSD Health and Monitor Performance | Mashtips

Hope this helps.

So how can we use these programs to catch a failing HDD before it actually suddenly fails? Can HDD's suddenly fail even when the monitoring programs show good health or are there things we can look for?

Hey Kol you use HWInfo right?
You can set it to run at boot and give warnings to you know?

Cliff S said:

Hey Kol you use HWInfo right?
You can set it to run at boot and give warnings to you know?

No I didn't. One small issue though is if you continually monitor SMART with HWiNFO it prevents the drive from sleeping. I might ask Martin at his forum whether there's any way around that to be able to use alerts.

Kol12 said:

No I didn't. One small issue though is if you continually monitor SMART with HWiNFO it prevents the drive from sleeping. I might ask Martin at his forum whether there's any way around that to be able to use alerts.

I never let my drives sleep, you don't save any real power(only useful for battery powered devices like laptops and tablets), and the disk remains responsive at all times.

Kol12 said:

So how can we use these programs to catch a failing HDD

Kol12 said:

before it actually suddenly fails? Can HDD's suddenly fail even when the monitoring programs show good health or are there things we can look for?

There is Windows task, which will notify you, based on SMART, it did alert me, when my HDD was failing.

Cliff S said:

I never let my drives sleep, you don't save any real power(only useful for battery powered devices like laptops and tablets), and the disk remains responsive at all times.

Not to mention, it prolongs its life. Powering ON/OFF any electronics puts a stress on it and it will most likely die during this period. I try to turn it on and keep it on until I go to sleep. I have turning off HDDs disabled.

Code:

reg add "HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Power\PowerSettings\E69653CA-CF7F-4F05-AA73-CB833FA90AD4" /v "DCSettingIndex" /t REG_DWORD /d "0" /f

No sleeping HDDs here either. Aside from the responsiveness issue, it's a bit like an incandescent light bulb....... Biggest strain is turning ON. Head movement (parked to active zone) is far more mechanical wear and tear than a constant 7200 rpm spin. And with Windows propensity for liking to use space on any attached drive for it's temp work, that would only increase it. I doubt the 20 minute default timeout for setting to idle/sleep does much good.

Cliff S said:

I never let my drives sleep, you don't save any real power(only useful for battery powered devices like laptops and tablets), and the disk remains responsive at all times.

So sleeping doesn't reduce HDD wear? If it's powered but not actually reading/writing what is it doing? Mechanical drives I'm referring to.