HDD S.M.A.R.T Option

[koldapu]

yeah, but with what you end up paying for a zip drive then zip disks . . .

get an external hard drive . . . about $120 for a 80GB!

external zip drive is $100 . . . then you gotta buy disks . . . and even those only go upto 750MB, and even THOSE are expensive!

 

[Demalii]

typically you'll know if your hard drive is going out.. computer crashing randomly, not starting up all the way, you'll hear the hard drive turning off an on, etc.. and i've never had a hd just die on me as long as i was using it.. my friend had one he kept in storage for like 6 months and now it doesn't work, but it's 5 years old anyways. It's always a good idea to backup anything important on cd or tape or whatever... or maybe another drive

 

[koldapu]

and if you have REALLY important stuff (office files, taxes, accounting, all that stuff) and dont mind a performance lag, than RAID1 is the way to go . . .

 

[Perditionchi1d]

i once had an old compaq presario and about half a year ago i went to bed with my pc on and in the morning my monitor read something along the lines of no os loaded. turns out my drive had crapped out on me. i went out and got a 40gb maxtor to replace it (paid $80 and got ripped off grr). the moral of the story is, if your hd is 3+ years old, i suggest you check its S.M.A.R.T. status periodically, say, 6 mnoths.