I was wondering if Windows 7 keeps track of any hard drive events that somehow tell me how my drives are doing.
Also, what if the drives are on a RAID volume? Does Windows record events for the individual drives?
Finally, what would be a set of relatively reliable events of my hard drive performance that are indicative of the overall health of the drive? (even if Windows does not keep track of them, but maybe some other tool does?)
PS: I saw the question: How to check the health of a hard drive, but the answers in that thread point to software solutions that run tests on your drive, as opposed to looking at the history of recent read/write failures/events.
Best Answer
The Windows Event log (or the logs of whichever OS you are running) should/will store any disk or disk controller errors that may crop up (ones that don't just crash Windows, or otherwise prevent log writing anyway).
The other place errors are stored is in the drive's S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). SMART is mentioned many times in the answers to the other question you linked, along with many utilities (not necessarily "Tests") to read the current condition of the drive as SMART sees it.
If you want other utilities for checking the SMART status check out this list from Wikipedia.
For RAID: Your RAID controller's software should monitor/provide each member disk's health status (which it gets by polling SMART on each drive).