How to check the health of your hard drive
Written by Philip Roy Most disk drives include S.M.A.R.T. hardware developed by IBM that allows hard disks to test themselves for potential problems. You can check the health of your hard disk in Disk Utility, located in Applications/Utilities.
To check the status of a disk, go into your Applications folder, into the Utilities folder and double-click on the Disk Utility application. Click on your hard drive disk in the left-hand column (make sure you click on the disk name and not a partition). Look at the bottom of the window to see the S.M.A.R.T. status (as shown in the example below).
If your disk is "verified," it's a valid disk with nothing wrong at this time. If you see "About to Fail" in red letters, back up your disk immediately and have the disk replaced. It will fail.
Taken from this page at Apple that includes more information.
Last Updated Monday, 10 March 2008
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