Hard drives failing - be proactive?

Hey all

We get a hell of a lot of hard drives come in failing way past they become useful to clone and repair (any corruption or damage) and I was thinking about proactive monitoring or alerts so we can catch it early.

So far SMART doesn't seem all that useful - out of 100 drives that seatools or western digital life tools (or whatever its called) detects as failing/failed only 1% will seem to trip the SMART status. Even non-bootable machines seem to not trip SMART lol...

Acronis drive monitor seemed perfect - until it started scare mongering into buying acronis products and generally being pants. 

Simply an email will do, or even a warning message to the user (not really the best way forward as half of them will just ignore it and carry on storing their life memories onto a terminally ill machine...). I was looking at GFI or similar for the future but even this relies of SMART I think.

If there are no recommendations, don't be afraid to have a discussion - its our most common repair but also our most ranging in difficulty (some we can clone, checkdisk/SFC and all is fine, whereas others won't even clone or if they do...its in vain)

comment:

1. For residential/desktops.....not sure how effective of a tool you'll be able to find. As you noticed...S.M.A.R.T. ain't all that reliable. Been tossing false flags since it came out way back in the Win95 or Win3 or earlier days. And when a drive really does die....SMART rarely knows about it.

2. Foolish's Disk Health Monitor relies on disk events, not SMART, so maybe it will be of some help. It can e-mail you or the client a notification.

3. Seems like a very useful tool. I am gonna check it out and test it.

4. Too bad it's for non-commercial use only (I am a big fan of Nick's products, but don't need dSupportSuite so this is out for me):

License:

Personal use: Disk Health Monitor is FREE for personal use only if you acknowledge that this program is provided with no warranties or guarantees of any kind, and that you (not John N. Shaw, not Foolish IT, LLC, not my web host, not your ISP, not your mother) and only you are held as the bearer of sole responsibility for any use or misuse of this software and any resulting damages in any form, monetary or otherwise. If you do not accept this policy but are still compelled to use the software, there is a small one-time licensing fee of 10 million dollars.

Commercial use: Disk Health Monitor cannot be used commercially, period.

See dSupportSuite for commercial functionality.

5. I believe it to be very important to regularly test hard drives to ensure that they are stable, but I don't think there is a monitoring tool that is going to safely predict a failure before it happens any better than SMART monitoring. As you have already noted, most drives just fail without warning...usually with the assistance of the end user bumping or dropping the device.

So, it makes more sense to be more proactive about solid backup routines and monitor them.

I have had to recover data on drives that crashed during testing. I've done data recovery on drives that were backed up, to find out that the backup was outdated or not backing up the data that it should have.

There is only one case where I did a data recovery for someone who had a solid healthy backup. Unfortunately, it was an online backup that was encrypted with a forgotten key with no back door. He could log into the web interface to see his data listed, but the only way to restore the backup was by installing the software on a fresh system, enter the encryption key and restore.

6. So really there is no way other than to ensure the drive is making good healthy regular images. I notice that Nick's marked that drive monitor as obsolete   is that due to it being integrated into the support suite I wonder.