There is nothing more frustrating than a hard disk failure. And every HD fails at one point. It’s sure as death. However, there is a technology called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) that is built into most modern hard drives and it can give you early warning that you need to get your stuff moved to another disk. To check the SMART status of your HD you can open the Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, click on your HD icon and check the last row on the bottom right. If it says Verified than you’re safe.
If you want SMART to be checked automatically download the free SMARTReporter (140K) from Julian Mayer. It can run in the background and use virtually no CPU and just 17MB of memory to periodically check your HD based on your settings. A little green icon will be sitting in your menubar telling you that all is fine and will warn you if your HD is about to fail. It’s not a life saver, but could be a file saver.
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