Old HardDisk still working

[cute.bandar]

I have a 9 year old 500GB seagate HDD that is fine and has always worked perfectly.
Lifetime Bytes Read: 1.86 TB
Lifetime Bytes Written: 898.32 GB
Power-On Hours: 25461

SMART suggests its in fine condition, but google says that SMART can't be relied upon.
Is there a reliable way to find the health of the HDD ? I just don't want to surprised by a dead HDD any morning.

btw how common are such old working hard disks ? Anyone has anything older ? with more power on hours ?

Edit: Sorry, accidentally pressed the submit button before writing the full post.

 

[Vyom]

9 years! I think it's risky to put important data on it. Just keep expandable data on it.

 

[quicky008]

i have a 80gb seagate sata hdd from 2006 that works fine to this very day-even though its currently not in use,the last time i checked it (which was a couple of months ago),it was fully operational and didn't have any bad sectors or other issues.

 

[patkim]

HDDs that I had bought way back in 2005 & 2007 still work very well though they have not been subjected to 25K hours yet. One has developed a few remapped sectors a few years back but still there are no issues.

I have not yet done enough research to be conclusive here..though it might be probably true that the HDDs that have aged and have high power on hours and high LBA written might be more prone to failure. Check the internet for any such stats and analysis.

However in my experience you might even be surprised by a brand new HDD failing within 10 days and another one lasting over 10 years.

My HDDs from 2005 & 2007 still work perfectly. One of the two has not even seen any reduction in any of the critical parameter's normalized value, yet my another Toshiba brand new HDD from Laptop ended up within an year. It developed 16K bad sectors overnight!

IMO what matters is that you have adequate back up solutions.

There are third party tools that claim to predict the Health of the HDD and Failure prediction model. These are bit more than SMART reporting tools. They sit in System Tray and monitor the HDD and predict possible failure in advance. If you are interested you can give it a try. Yet I guess they eventually base their algorithm on SMART parameters in some way or the other.

Few years back I had tried one such tool called HDDLife. Most are Trialware's though. Generally instead of spending 20 - 30$ on such tools I would rather buy a new HDD for backup.