Windows Backup

Perhaps you will post your impression after you try it out? Thanks.

 

the hard disk has some internal monitoring and when you keep an eye on that then you have advance warning of a hard disk failing.

but for the money that hard disks cost once they get two years old I just replace them - waiting until failure (and you are in the middle of a trade) is not the best strategy.

Maria

 

hi maria,

please elaborate

 

SMART?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis,_and_Reporting_Technology

 

I've had a chance to try it with a PATA drive it and it worked fine. I don't have a bare (unused) SATA drive to try at the moment.

 

Did you by chance calculate its data transfer rate... mb/sec?

 

I downloaded "HDD Health" (free) and it seems to work great!

 

No but that is a good idea, just ran it now, this is for a 120GB 7200rpm Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drive

SiSoftware Sandra 2007

Physical Disk Benchmark Results
Drive Index : 32 MB/s
Random Access Time : 14 ms

File Systems Benchmark Results
Drive Index : 27 MB/s
Random Access Time : 14 ms

Benchmark Breakdown
Buffered Read : 30 MB/s
Sequential Read : 32 MB/s
Random Read : 22 MB/s
Buffered Write : 25 MB/s
Sequential Write : 25 MB/s
Random Write : 25 MB/s
Random Access Time : 14 ms (estimated)

Drive
Drive Type : Hard Disk
Total Size : 114GB
Free Space : 104GB, 91%
Cluster Size : 4kB

 

This is about the same speed as indicated by the other makers.... would make sense to buy this one on price... it's only about 1/2 the others.

 

I see someone else has already answered it (S.M.A.R.T.)

However it will not prevent dried up bearings & dropping of hard disks (laptops) although in the latter case Lenovo (ex-IBM) has come up with "active protection system" which measures the acceleration of the machine and then parks the heads if it thinks there is going to be a hard knock.

The mechanical failure (bearings drying up or something else) is the reason that I replace every two years the HD. (Had once a 20Mb Seagate that had to "warm up" before the spindle would run at a decent speed, normally about 10 minutes.... Those were the days that them HD were costing you a small fortune.)

The HD monitoring software is good for capturing bad blocks which used to be a major reason for (gradual) HD failure however more recently I am getting the impression that HD failure is more related to other causes and often more sudden.

Maria