Sometimes, I don't know why I run these tests. 

I recently read a post by David Alison about a failing hard disk. I figured I'd download and install the SMART Utility for Mac he references, just for the heck of it. This $25 tool scans your hard disks, collects the hardware information and gives reports of any problems. Of course, it just so happens that one of my drives has started to throw off bad sectors:

This is my primary drive, and contains everything except my iTunes library, so this is not a good thing to see.

Now, I am backed up to the hilt, with a copy of my data on my Time Capsule, an offline backup to BackBlaze and a mirror image copied to a second hard drive with SuperDuper each night (that's the /dev/disk1 in the screen shot above).

But who wants to wait for a drive to fail before doing something? Not only might I lose some data due to corruption of my backup, but with my luck, the drive will die an hour before a deadline. 

The good news is that a fast 1Tb hard disk is available for less than $100 now. Looks like I've got a new weekend project.