New hdd's in server - Healthy status

well you cant really. Either its working or they are about to break. You might see it with SMART but they can just seize up and stop working. The only thing you can do is either not use them much (although some say 24 7 is even better) and make sure you have really good cooling in there.

This is why people look at backup solutions or at least run them in raid mode or a software raid like flexraid or unraid.

I don't think there is really any way to know, hard drives just fail sooner or later. Your tools might pick it up, and they might not depending on the issue. If there was a way to know in advance, Enterprise type environments wouldn't have disks failing on them.

I would take a look at adding a disk and using it as a parity disk in FlexRAID if you want to protect your data. Should protect you from any individual disk crash.

Youre basically wasting your time doing all those scans. Its not going to show you anything more than what the smart status shows. Mostly those are to check the integrity of the files on the disks and not the disks themselves. If you dont have windows 7 I would have a good defrag program running and one that shows the smart status as well. Then you know the files are as safe as they can be and what little warning you can get.

Sounds like your going a little overboard on checking your drives. Just keep a good backup of your most important files and don't worry about them. If ones going to fail its going to fail no matter how many times you check them. Windows 7 will alert you to any problems with a drive with smart enabled.

yeah it should see the bad sectors if you run that. But you really should look at a raid solution at least then if a drive goes bad no data loss. But a true 1-1 backup solution is best. Might even think about online storage such as mozy something like that.

FlexRAID. It wont copy the data over automatically, but if will create a parity disk that will protect your data from a disk crash. You can then replace the bad disk and use the parity information to rebuild the data from the bad disk.

the only thing you really need to do is...nothing


if you are paranoid then download smartmontools, run it once a week on every drive and keep count of read, write and verify errors


look for the numbers I wrote in bold not to increment, if they do week to week then your drive is likely on it's way out, but nothing is definitive


smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [i686-pc-mingw32-2003-sp2] (sf-win32-5.39.1-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

Device: SEAGATE ST9900805SS Version: 0001
Serial number: 6XS085CM0000B1230G3S
Device type: disk
Transport protocol: SAS
Local Time is: Thu Feb 24 16:52:54 2011 EST
Device supports SMART and is Enabled
Temperature Warning Enabled
SMART Health Status: OK

Current Drive Temperature: 30 C
Drive Trip Temperature: 68 C
Manufactured in week 51 of year 2010
Specified cycle count over device lifetime: 10000
Accumulated start-stop cycles: 3
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime: 300000
Accumulated load-unload cycles: 3
Elements in grown defect list: 0
Vendor (Seagate) cache information
Blocks sent to initiator = 5061
Blocks received from initiator = 52396
Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 27
Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 10
Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 0
Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information
number of hours powered up = 0.10
number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 57

Error counter log:
Errors Corrected by Total Correction Gigabytes Total
ECC rereads/ errors algorithm processed uncorrected
fast | delayed rewrites corrected invocations [10^9 bytes] errors
read: 9592 0 0 9592 0 0.003 0
write: 0 0 0 0 0 0.027 0

Non-medium error count: 0

[GLTSD (Global Logging Target Save Disable) set. Enable Save with '-S on']
No self-tests have been logged
Long (extended) Self Test duration: 7560 seconds [126.0 minutes]

I do not think you need to do a surface scan, the drive should be reallocating bad sectors on it's own.

If you are really serious about your hard drives, check out Spin-Rite from grc.com. It does low-drive-level read-write checks of each sector. If there are problems with that sector it tells the drive to never use that sector. I use it on every drive I buy, first thing.