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 stolen during your set). But it is helpful to know whether a drive is healthy or not. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring features built into drives can help.

Lifehacker today points to a free Windows utility for the job called CrystalDiskInfo:

CrystalDiskInfo Monitors Hard Drive Health and Uptime [via gHacks]

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 smartmontools 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

SMARTReporter (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 command line, via something like this:

diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART

Windows

In addition to CrystalDiskInfo, you have a number of options:

SpeedFan is a general-purpose monitoring and management tool for just about everything, including (as the name implies) fans.

HDD Health 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 what SMART is and how to interpret data you get – well worth reading whether or not you’re a SpeedFan user.

Now, come on. This has to be a CDM reader who wins this contest, right? That or else we have to come up with our own, better idea. Or, for that matter, better recordings than these Hitachi sounds — surely some of you have dying hard driv– Bad Disk Error. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?

Hard Drive Dying Dance Track Contest [Gizmodo]

Digital music is great, but it’s struck some notes of discord among serious music listeners. Lossy compression is reducing the quality of audio, a step backwards from the traditional CD. And if you like classical music, get ready for major headaches organizing your music. Not to mention, doesn’t anyone miss their stereo system?

Enter the new Olive Symphony. There are several things about this box that are promising:

Lossless music: An 80 GB hard drive rips your CDs at full-quality (via the integrated CD, or pre-loaded from your collection for free by Olive when you buy it)

Classical music management: Special Mac/PC software uses a special database to tag classical music accurately
Integrated wireless: Wi-Fi is built in

USB and CD: Transfer songs to your iPod or burn a CD

Hi-fi: Olive promises hi-fi sound and includes digital outputs to the stereo

Sure, it’s US$899, but I have to say, finally this is a digital audio player that feels like a step forward, instead of backward. Let’s hope this is a sign of trends to come. Due mid-August.