I like dd, although it only reads it, usually a read test of the entire disk will uncover if your hard drive is bad in some parts. This is a good thing to do at least once a month, a lot of times bizarre program behavior, laginess and crashing/unnmounting problems etc.. are due to a failing disc and SMART won't know it or indicate a problem: We must also remember there's never a guarantee, I've found that ever since we moved to larger and more platters per drive with 1TB drives........

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/RAID-5-Doomed-2009,6525.html I found this article interesting, it basically says that with 2TB hard drives or larger sizes, you are more likely to encounter an unrecoverable read error. But is this just another Y2K doomsday? Don't HDD's have enough advanced hardware ECC error and read recovery to prevent this from happening? I'm almost tempted to build a 3 x........