tick tick grind tick

That's the sound of the eminent demise of a harddrive on your computer. Most harddrives right now are made of a stack of round plates, like a old jukebox. If they get out of alignment they can start grinding on each other or like those old lps they can start to skip.

However, it's darn near impossible to tell when your harddrive is about to go. Harddrives can last between 3 to 7 years or so. Usually people run out of room on the harddrive before the harddrive breaks, but sometimes that's not the case. Harddrive damage can just look like the operating system is messed up or a slow computer. But a coworker pointed me to this freeware called, "Smart Reporter, which polls your ATA or SATA internal drive just to check on it and it sends an email if it's not ok.

We plan to install this on all the clients, especially the eMacs which are notorious for falling apart.