Hdd Health Checkers

Hey all, have any of you ever used a tool to check your HDD health?

Not speaking about "S.M.A.R.T" but instead programs that will decode what it is telling you and estimate the life left on your HDD.

So far I have only used one program, HDDhealth, but it seems to always show 100%, even on drives that have been used extensively for over a year.

Have any of you others used that program with similar results, or different results?

Or have any of you used another program?

At the moment I am going to test out "HDTune" and see what it comes up with.

In the meantime, any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

I have used quite a few of these programs that seem to always say 100% though, so I don't know how well it works

Yeah, that's my main issue right now...With them saying 100% it makes me wonder if they are really working or not.

There is the possibility that they will show 100% when they are "working fine" and will show less as it degrades. It's really hard to tell since when I see that they are at 100% I usually just uninstall the program as I assume it doesn't work.

As for this HDTune program, it's working exceptionally well. Rather than putting a % on the health, it explains the various parts and has an "OK" by what's in good shape.

It also includes extra settings for HDD scanning - bad sectors, fully "erase" the drive by writing 0's or 1's, etc.

The feature I do find to be the best on it is that it tells the temperature of the drive. Like right now mine is running at 46 Celcius.

Ive used a few HDD health check applications - mainly SMART
They dont seem to gelpful, I have never got a result other that 100%

There has to be *something* that really works.

Isn't SMART just the system built into HDD's themselves? Like the thing you can see in your BIOS I mean.