Interesting DiskCheckup predictions

[TonyToews]

This hard drive has been installed for about a month. It has always shown the following future failures. I try to run this every few days for an hour or two. The future dates have been extending out further and further. When initially installed it was predicting failure in two or three days.

Not knowing how well this copy and paste from Notepad will work you may need to copy and paste the following into Notepad to see the formatting of the data.

DiskCheckup Version: DiskCheckup V2.1 Build: 1004
SmartDisk DLL Version: SmartDisk DLL SDK v1.0 Build: 1017
Time of export: 20:49:42 10-Aug-2009
Device ID: 0
Device Capacity: 476937 MB
Serial Number: 5VJ0CPBM
Model Number: ST9500420AS

SMART ATTRIBUTES:
ID Description Raw Value Status Value Worst Threshold TEC
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Raw Read Error Rate 13204478 OK 107 99 6 26 Jun 2010 17:53:25
3 Spin Up Time 0ms OK 98 98 85 22 Jan 2010 16:13:22
4 Start/Stop Count 11 OK 100 100 20 N.A.
5 Reallocated Sector Count 0 OK 100 100 36 N.A.
7 Seek Error Rate 12596435 OK 71 60 30 15 Sep 2009 21:44:46
9 Power On Time 619 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
A Spin Retry Count 0 OK 100 100 97 N.A.
C Power Cycle Count 11 OK 100 37 20 N.A.
B8 (Unknown attribute) 0 OK 100 100 99 N.A.
BB (Unknown attribute) 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
BC (Unknown attribute) 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
BD (Unknown attribute) 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
BE Temperature Difference from 100 840761389 OK 55 45 45 N.A.
BF Gsense Error Rate 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C0 Power off Retract Count 1 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C1 Load/Unload Cycle Count 2990 OK 99 99 0 N.A.
C2 Temperature 45 C OK 45 55 0 N.A.
C3 Hardware ECC Recovered 13204478 OK 51 49 0 N.A.
C5 Current Pending Sector Count 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C6 Uncorrectable Sector Count 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.
C7 UltraDMA CRC Error Count 0 OK 200 200 0 N.A.
F0 Head flying hours 613 OK 100 253 0 N.A.
F1 (Unknown attribute) 98173338 OK 100 253 0 N.A.
F2 (Unknown attribute) 1945225611 OK 100 253 0 N.A.
FE (Unknown attribute) 0 OK 100 100 0 N.A.

[David (PassMark)]

The dates are only a rough estimate at best based on extrapolation of past data. There is no way any software package can really predict the future.

[TonyToews]

The dates are only a rough estimate at best based on extrapolation of past data. There is no way any software package can really predict the future.

Yes, I understand that.

But when I was running this on my old 160 Gb hard drive for six months everything worked as expected. So I'm wondering if the SMART info is being misinterpreted by the DiskCheck program given that I have a very new 500 Gb hard drive. I'm thinking that this hard drive has totally different data in those fields than DiskCheck is expecting thus the data is being misinterpreted.

I also do regularly check my event log to see if there are any "real" disk errors being reported.

[David (PassMark)]

Not predicting an precise future failure date is not a result of misinterpreting data.

If all hard drives from all manufacturers progressively deteriorated in a nice linear fashion over time and it was possible measure this deterioration with a good level of accuracy, the precise extrapolation would be possible.

But unfortunately this is not the case, deteriorated can be sudden, measurement is not precise, and not all factors that might lead to failure can be measured.

So the number is rough, at best, and will vary as more data is collected.