Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi all!

I have a pretty old Western Digital 2TB HDD (WD20EARX). I bought it in 2011, so it's now 11 years old.

https://products.wdc.com/library/SpecSh ... 701229.pdf

Hard Disk Sentinel shows its health is somehow still at 100%, despite it being used so much, for so long. For comparison, my main system SSD, which has a power on time of 16x less than the HDD, already has health of 86%.

Screenshot here: https://i.postimg.cc/qqQCVFPL/Hard-Disk ... enshot.png.

Can the 100% health reading for the old HDD really be trusted? This thing is well into the age category of "generally the time HDDs fail". Should I just go ahead and ignore the reading and replace the thing before I lose data? I don't wanna get a replacement unnecessarily.

Thanks in advance for any advice provided.

It depends on how the hard disk used - and how long it actively used.

Generally if the drive worked in 24/7 mode, then it already reached the designed lifetime.

In this case Hard Disk Sentinel shows that Estimated remaining lifetime: over 100 days to suggest exactly that (while the hard disk seems perfect) it reached the end of its lifetime.
In such situations, they can (and usually) still work, sometimes for many years (especially if the operating conditions where good: proper cooling, proper power supply, no shock/vibrations etc.) but when the designed lifetime reached, sudden (unforeseen) failures are more common.

So in a mission critical environment, this Estimated remaining lifetime is a good indication to plan replacement. For non-critical data and/or secondary storage it can be still perfect, especially if the tests confirm that it works error-free:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests
I recommend to DO NOT trust the displayed 100% health, but perform the recommended tests on the above link: exactly to reveal if there is anything which can affect the operation - or confirm that the hard disk drive is really perfect.

SSDs tolerate only limited number of writes, so their health slowly but constantly decrease, as described at:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/kb/category/ ... orted.html
so the Health % of the SSD will surely decrease with time (with normal use).

hdsentinel wrote:It depends on how the hard disk used - and how long it actively used.

Generally if the drive worked in 24/7 mode, then it already reached the designed lifetime.

In this case Hard Disk Sentinel shows that Estimated remaining lifetime: over 100 days to suggest exactly that (while the hard disk seems perfect) it reached the end of its lifetime.
In such situations, they can (and usually) still work, sometimes for many years (especially if the operating conditions where good: proper cooling, proper power supply, no shock/vibrations etc.) but when the designed lifetime reached, sudden (unforeseen) failures are more common.

So in a mission critical environment, this Estimated remaining lifetime is a good indication to plan replacement. For non-critical data and/or secondary storage it can be still perfect, especially if the tests confirm that it works error-free:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests
I recommend to DO NOT trust the displayed 100% health, but perform the recommended tests on the above link: exactly to reveal if there is anything which can affect the operation - or confirm that the hard disk drive is really perfect.

SSDs tolerate only limited number of writes, so their health slowly but constantly decrease, as described at:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/kb/category/ ... orted.html
so the Health % of the SSD will surely decrease with time (with normal use).

Thank you so much for the helpful insights! I really appreciate it.

I wasn't aware of those tests. I ran the short and extended tests, and no errors were found.