How to check the status of hard drives?

Question

Hard disks

Hello!
I'm going to build a home server for files on an old computer. There are a lot of hard drives with a capacity of 160GB-1TB. Many of these discs are not mine at all and I don't know their history. Is there any way to find out how long each of them still has to live? What operations would you recommend?
The computer is very old, socket 478, pentium 4. The PCI-E port seems to be only 1 for the video card. Is there any way to mount an SSD drive?
I have a slightly newer computer, an Asus Commando motherboard, socket 775, there are only SATA1 ports, but I would like to connect the SDD via SATA3, is there any way to add a board to PCI-E? What would you recommend?

Answer 1

Classics of the genre - MHDD or Victoria.
If the surface is clean, then they will live as long as new ones. Those. until the first spontaneous failure.
SSD - SATA is SATA. The BIOS has no idea if it's an HDD or an SSD. Connect and work. There would be these same SATA ports in the right amount.
Asus Commando - there is no point in chasing SATA3. And it has SATA2 ports. In the most important load - random access on a small queue - even top-end SSDs do not rest on SATA2.
And if for some reason you want beautiful numbers of linear reading, then look for a SATA controller in the performance of at least PCI-E x2, otherwise you will run into the PCI-E bus.

Answer 2

If on Linux - then smartcl

Answer 3

Try to sell this stuff. Probably you will have to add a little and buy an HP microserver, the 7th generation is enough.

Answer 4

Victoria (hiren's bootcd).