How can I check that my Hard disk is OK

Hi,
I recently suffered a HD disk crash, all data lost and lucky that I had a backup on an external hard drive.
Can anyone tell me how I can ensure / monitor that my new Hard disk is OK and in good shape?
Thanks
Keith

You can check in Disk Utility > Smart Status, it will monitor the internal drive.
If your technically minded, what you do is use Disk Utility booted on another medium like a Carbon Copy Cloner clone drive, then target the internal drive and select the Erase feature and move the slider one space to the right from the left and click Apply.
This will of course will erase everything on the drive, so you need to select the entire drive to erases everything.
The slider moved one space to the right in Disk Utility is what's called a Zero fill, it's typically a security feature for hard drives to remove all traces of data, but it doubles as a method to engage the automatic ability for the driver firmware to map off any bad or failing sectors on the magnetic medium of your hard drive as the Zero's are read back for confirmation.
It's about as low level format as one can do.
Why do this?  Because all drives ship with bad sectors, some with entire defective areas on the drive.
So this Zero fill process helps get rid of most of them and it checks the integrity of the entire drive  BEFORE you lay your data on it.
It results in a very fast read speeds and very reliable hard drive retention of the data you place on it, as it only does so on mostly good sectors.
This defragging procedure explains it
How to safely defrag a Mac's hard drive

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