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In this question i checked my HDD health on a drive i had for roughly a year.

It has 188 power on count and 896 power on hours. Is this slow or high value for a drive that may be failing? What are your values and is the drive in perfect health?

Also is there a place i can find the average lifespan for my drive (or drives in general?)

NOTE: This is a external USB HDD

Community
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  • Only 2 years, but used intensively thus 2843 count and 7073 hours, it only has a spin problem once in a long time which you won't even notice while using it, for the rest it is perfectly fine... ;-) – Tamara Wijsman Sep 05 '10 at 23:56

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It means the drive has been powered up 188 times, and has had 896 total hours of run time accumulated. It does not indicate anything about the health of that drive.

Lifespan is too hard to predict for any drive, google has some interesting statistics for failed hard drives

http://www.myce.com/news/Hard-Disk-SMART-data-is-ineffective-at-predicting-failure-13049/

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Going by their statistics, hard drives tend to fail the most in their early stage with about 3% failing in the first three months and then at a fairly steady rate after 2 years, with 5 years being the typical end-of-life.

But this is for drives that run 24/7. So do the math on 2 to 5 years at 8760 hours per year.

Moab
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  • I think powering a drive on and off will wear if off much faster than just letting it spin. So just going by the rule of three will not work here. – Baarn Jan 22 '12 at 03:44
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Unfortunately powering on and off a drive does not wear it out faster or slower. I have one drive currently with a power on count of 2,401 and 36,615 hours that is fine and another that has a power on count of 95 and 17,442 total hours that has failed.

Chris H
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    This is incorrect. Spinning up puts the most strain onto a HDD. It's recommended to run them spinning 24/7 to maximize their lifetime. This advice is based on experience of data centers that run arrays of hundreds or thousands of HDDs. – gronostaj Jul 10 '20 at 12:18
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is there a place i can find the average lifespan for my drive

There is a list of measured life spans for various hdd models: https://github.com/linuxhw/SMART/blob/master/README.md

Check your drive model in this list. Also check it in the list of particular model samples in All_HDD.md file.

You can detect model of your drive by the smartctl tool from smartmontools package:

sudo smartctl -x /dev/sdX | grep Model

Also you can find a list of important error types to search for in the README (Reported_Uncorrect, Total_Pending_Sectors, etc.).

Check health of your drive by the command (look at the 'SMART Attributes Data Structure' table):

sudo smartctl -x /dev/sdX | less
linuxbuild
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