[alligator]

I had some problems with a hard drive (no noise), and I had to format the drive and start over. Disk Utility couldn't fix it unless I reformatted the drive. I did that and it works fine now. Is there a way to run something to test the drive to see if it will fail?

[dimmer]

The drive should have a SMART status, if it's anything close to new. But hmm, you don't want to depend upon that so much. It will tell you if a drive starts to go bad, but if a big mechanical failure hits, you'd still be screwed. So a good backup regime still rocks.

[mduell]

Check the S.M.A.R.T. parameters, see how close they are to the thresholds.

[dimmer]

And Disk Utility tells you SMART status, I think?

(Yes, it does, I checked. But still, there should be a better way that doesn't require opening an app...)

[mduell]

Disk Utility gives you a nearly useless one-parameter binary status... either good or dead.

Download SMARTReporter or something similar for the 20 or so parameters (each with 100+ levels) to see how the disk is doing.