To avoid any hdd failure, its always better to check the hard drive once in every month or if you are receiving the hard drive failure E-mail alerts then run the following command to test hard drive. For example if you are using the hard drive failure notification for the partition /dev/sda1 then run the following command.

root@server [~]# badblocks -v -v /dev/sda1

After running above command it will show you following running scanning result

root@server [~# badblocks -v -v /dev/sda1
Checking blocks 0 to 5116671
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test):           42496/        5116671

If nothing found out faulty on hard drive, it will show you the following result.

root@server [~]# badblocks -v -v /dev/sda1
Checking blocks 0 to 5116671
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): done
Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found.