[VawSwaspamups]

We live and die by hard drives for music. There’s no substitute for redundancy and backups (hey, you could be Matthew Dear and have a drive [You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.]). But it is helpful to know whether a drive is healthy or not. [You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.] built into drives can help.
</p> </p> Lifehacker today points to a free Windows utility for the job called [You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.]:
[You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.] [via [You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.]]
But that got me thinking about other tools. There’s quite a range of choices for Mac, Windows, Linux, and even some obscure operating systems. The only bad news: generally you’ll only be able to monitor internal drives, unless your external drive is eSATA rather than USB or FireWire. (eSATA is where I’d like to go generally – it’s quite a lot faster, and frees up your USB and FireWire buses for other things — but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Cross-platform / Linux
The [You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.] package is a powerful ATA/ATAPI/SATA monitoring tool that runs on – well, pretty much everything. There’s a Windows package, plus a *nix version for Mac, Linux, BSD, Cygwin on Windows, Solaris, OS/2, QNX, and so on. This looks like your best choice on Linux.
Mac OS X
[You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.] (pictured at top) is probably the friendliest way to get at SMART data for SATA, ATA, and eSATA drives on the Mac. It even includes a handy menu bar item so you can monitor how your drive is doing at a glance. It’s free via Open Source “MIT License.”
You can also use the [You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.], via something like this:
diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART
</p> </p> </p> </p> </p> </p> </p> </p> Windows
In addition to CrystalDiskInfo, you have a number of options:
[You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.] is a general-purpose monitoring and management tool for just about everything, including (as the name implies) fans.
[You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.] is a hard disk-only monitoring tool, like the others here. One thing it has going for it: friendly feedback and tidy tabs to view it.
More Information
The good folks at SpeedFan have an article on [You cannot see the link as you're not logged in. Click here to login or here to register.] and how to interpret data you get – well worth reading whether or not you’re a SpeedFan user.
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