Not Understanding What DiskCheckup is Telling me

[scc]

OK, I only installed DiskCheckup because I thought I'd had a failed drive and I wanted advance warning next time, I also haven't got around to setting things up so that it starts up when my computer does, so I don't have many data points.

That said for one of my hard drives on the first of the month I've got a spin up record of 237, on the second 182, and the third 162, today, when I remembered to start the program I'm getting a reading of 161 and based upon this DiskCheckup is saying my drive will fail within a month.

Can someone please explain this to my? The spin up time is going down, not up , so why does DiskCheckup think that it's going to fail?

[keith]

DiskCheckup predicts the failure date of your hard drives based on the history of collected SMART attributes of your hard drives. It computes the failure date of when the threshold will be crossed by assuming a linear degradation of the attribute values. However, because there is no standard on how the attribute values are assigned by the manufacturer, there can be a huge variance in the collected values such as in your case. Therefore, a linear model would not be appropriate in this case, and the predicted time should not be considered accurate.

However, in general, attribute values >= 100 are considered normal. As long as they are not near the threshold value (usually less than 100), there should not be a cause for concern for the particular attribute. Still, sudden failures can occur without warning. This is why backup up your data on a regular basis is highly recommended.