"You really shouldn't need to check the HDD until it is near the end of it's warranty period. In which case I recommend you throw away the drive. Rather then to chance the fact that it is near sudden unpredictable death."
This is bad advice. If you are worried about your drive failing, then you should run smart tests on it so you can identify the failing drive quickly and take action if needed.
Smart is designed to warn you of a drive failure before it happens, whereas good hardware like a RAID controller will let you know once it has failed.
Warranty length is not an indication of drive health.
My advice to you would be
- Backup
- Run a daily SMART short test on critical drives like in home server's RAID array or NAS devices if they support it.
- If the drive(s) is especially critical run a weekly long test in off hours to identify a failing drive as soon as possible before the data is unreadable.
After you identify an issue, RMA the drive if it is under warranty, or purchase a replacement if it is not.
If uptime is required then invest in a simple RAID solution like RAID 1/5/6 if the data needs to be available 24/7.
I don't know of a single person who is proactively replacing their laptop hard drives every 1-3 years depending on the warranty.
If it is a computer you normally use, there are utilities that load at boot and run in the background that will monitor the SMART values and alert you to a problem. I rarely use Windows so I'm not up on current offerings, but do a Google search to see what's available now. – fixer1234 – 2014-12-26T20:55:13.913
Is this a desktop computer that you activly view, that you know what is going on with? or a computer your in charge of but are never at, a server (even media server) or you connect remotly and would want to know why something does not work? – Psycogeek – 2014-02-13T04:17:55.777