Comment 218 for bug 59695

Brian: Thanks for reminding me that the Old_age values don't always necessarily start at 100.

I apologise if anyone thinks I am being harsh, but I see a lot of hair pulling about how drives are going to die in 6 months, with numbers that are very hard to interpret (something I am clearly guilty of, because there were some mistakes in my comment).

It's also interesting to see VALUEs of 001 in ubuntu_demon's comment - I find it extremely hard to believe that this is actually true. It's yet more evidence of vendor specific SMART behaviour, which puts even more doubt on the available data, especially since those posts don't appear to be shortly followed by VALUEs of 000 with a FAILING_NOW tag.

I suggest that anyone who is genuinely worried about their disk confirm the output of smartctl by running a tool from their hard disk's vendor (the smartmontools FAQ lists http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/be_hdd2.html as a good source thereof, and has information about ways to run them, since they are mostly MS-DOS tools).