Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi, first than all, congratulations by HD Sentinel, amazing tool and solid confident forum.

I have a WD Black 1TB which report a Power On Time of 2567 days and Estimated remaining Life Time: more than 100 days. That's about 62 thousand hours, which seem to places the risk indicator very high according to standards on life spam.
However catches my attention the health of the disk and its flawless performance during near of 7 years, both 100% Performance and Health.
Shouldn't the hard drive be dead already with such old age?

The disk has survived 5 PC renewals instances / upgrades in 7 years, sharing loads with another 1TB WD black which is a bit newer, about 4 years and 83% Health, 100% performance.

I regularly backup it, so not risk on data lost, but I don't know whether to keep it in use or to get rid of it for fear some random data corruption may inadvertently occur.
BTW, do you know of similar rating? Or is this an unusual case?

Thanks for your message and kind words !

Congrats for the 100% Health and Performance for the WD Black drive, good to hear

Generally if the hard disk drive had good operating environment: stable power supply, good ventillation and low temperature, proper cables/connections then yes, we can expect that the drive should work for many years, without any major issues.

While it is still 100% perfect, yes, after reaching the end of designed lifetime, we can't be sure that it would still run for years: according the experiences, after the designed lifetime, the chances of sudden (unforeseen) failures increase. A typical situation is that drive(s) running in continuous 24/7 mode stopped - and they may not able to spin up again due to mechanical wearout. But this depends on lots of factors: very high Start/stop cycles, Load/unload cycle count can cause higher mechanical wear (= higher chance for possible failure).

For secondary storage such hard disks can be perfect, they can even work for additional years. However, the Estimated Remaining Lifetime value suggests that in a mission critical environment, it may be better to consider replacement. Maybe not immediately (= "more than 100 days") but in the near future, just to ensure problem-free operation without unforeseen events as planned replacement/cloning may be always better and easier than a sudden failure and attmpts for data recovery.