Hard Drive About To Go Kaput?

[andym172]

The HD in my Mac Pro is slow and pretty noisy leading me to think that it may be about to meet its maker - well, more accurately, the bin

Is there any software available to test the health of a HD?

The spec's of my HD are:

Capacity: 232.89 GB
Model: ST3250824AS P
Revision: 3.BQH

If I were to replace it (possibly with a 500GB HD), which model would people recommend? I work in Aperture & CS2 a lot.

 

[volvoben]

It seems a bit soon for a Mac Pro HDD to be headed south...

You should check the S.M.A.R.T. status (a health check all modern HDDs have built in). You can do this in Disk Utility, select the HDD and its status will be on the bottom I believe. This is no guarantee about the health of your drive, but it's a start. Any sound that's not regular spinning (almost silent) or reading is a bad sign, but lots of reading could just mean a background process is underway (spotlight, any number of other things). check activity monitor for disk usage, it'll tell you if it's being used or not.

500gb seems to be the price/capacity sweet spot currently, I like my WD500 SE series drive, but any WD or Seagate drive should be fine, same with maxtor samsung etc, I just haven't used them much.