I have a 10 year old machine that I'm using as a small home theater server, and would like to know if the HDD is about to fail. I ran the following smartctl --all
test and some of the error values seem very high.
Answer
You can't rely to much on SMART information to tell you if a drive is going to die. Its not useless, but its not something that can be generalised (different drives have different "normal" values) and studies have shown that SMART values are not nearly as highly correlated with pending failures as one might hope. (See here and here).
You may be able to run some SMART tests to test your drive which can tell you if its failing (SMART drives often have self tests), and if SMART does say the disk is failing or has failed, be inclined to back up ASAP and write off the drive as dying.
10 years IS a long time for a drive, so best practice would be to replace it anyway.
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