how to see signs of hard drive failure

[dominican2589]

I have a desktop that is now 5 years old. That got me thinking, how much longer can i expect my hard drive to last me? I've read that about the average life span is 5 years.

I have speed fan installed on my computer and it says that my drive is healthy and with a 96% performance. But does that really man anything? Can a drive that comes up as healthy die the next day or will I see something else other than "healthy" on hard drive monitoring programs before I should start worrying?

 

[kmote]

Traditionally noise is one good sign the drive is on it's way out. Good advice though is just to keep everything backed up all the time. The healthy message in speedfan is probably from the drives SMART status - not perfect to say the least but then nothing is with these things.

 

[dominican2589]

so it is possible that a drive working today can start getting random errors or stop working the next day? other than noise, what else can I look for as signs of a failing drive?

how about external drives that I do not use often. I would assume that since i only use it every now and then that the moving parts are not wearing down or do those drives run the same risk as drives used for the OS and such?