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
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.
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
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.
