I lost one hard drive at home and two at the office in less than six months, and in each case the event log had included warnings of impending doom. I don’t check event logs often, so the warnings went unnoticed. Utilities exist to monitor hard drive health, but it looks like USB hard drives aren’t supported yet. This is a problem since I have three at home and two fairly important ones at the office.



Article is available at MSDN.

Important: The source was written for .NET 2.0 Beta 2.  Breaking changes were made to .NET before RTM, so that code will not compile on it. This code works on the final version.