how do I monitor my hard drive's condition?
 

I finally got back to Linux (MEPIS), after being without it for months because some video problem prevented my old failing computer from running it. I reinstalled both Linux and Windows from scratch on this new computer, and some of the many problems I encountered in the transition made me wonder if my main hard drive is failing. (I didn't expect it to, because I bought it at about this time last year.) What Linux software should I use to check its integrity?

Since it's recent it'll be SMART capable, so you can run 'smartd'.

The problem with smart is that a study has shown that it only gives prior warning of failure in about 50% cases in which failure is imminent. The other 50% just fail without anything showing up in smart.

So don't let the fact that smart doesn't show you anything bad convince you that a backup isn't advisable...

Post the URI of that study please?

Thanks! That's a really useful document. Shame it doesn't offer any practical advice yet.

Yes, there is a lot of detail in there (maybe too much for some people), but what I've taken away from it is:

• SMART is nice; SMART us useful; but as I said earlier, its only in about 50% of cases that SMART gives you a warning of imminent disk drive failure
• Its easy to over-estimate the contribution of temperature to premature disk drive failures. It still seems worth trying to keep environmental temperatures reasonable, but it is unclear that this is going to give you much of a win in reducing disk drive failure rate.
• Some disk drives are less reliable than others. Whether you are 'lucky' with your disk drive supplier can have a bigger impact on overall reliability than the more obvious things like temperature, and it could be a 'bad' batch or a 'bad' manufacturer issue

Oh, and even in spite of all that info on failures, disk drives are quite reliable really these days. You are more likely to lose data to an operator error than to a hardware failure.