VMS And Hard Drive Self Monitoring And Reporting Software

A similar topic was started a tad earlier. Perhaps you can find some information you need there.

Also, most RAID controllers offer the option to be emailed once a drive starts failing. You could check that out ?

Yes, read the other thread...

Summary:

Your VMS may have a built-in monitoring and reporting tool. Windows has some monitoring capabilities. There are SMART tools that can send out emails.

There's a bit of overhead to it, but Nagios (and Zenoss and others) can provide for some really nice monitoring. We use Nagios to monitor servers, switches, cameras, encoders, access control readers, printers, desktops, and lots of IP devices.

HDTune is one popular one. I've been playing with Hard Disk Sentinel and quite like it - gives full health and usage status reports and can alert you well in advance of imminent failures.The enterprise version supports central monitoring and management over the network.

For more general system monitoring, SpeeFan is a great donationware utility that will monitor pretty much every fan speed and temperature sensor in a computer (drives, motherboard, CPU(s), etc.), keep a running graph of those readings, and email you when something's over a set threshold.