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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

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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... ;-) – Tom Wijsman Sep 5 '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 hmath on 2 to 5 years at 8760 hours per year.

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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. – Walter Maier-Murdnelch Jan 22 at 3:44
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