From our earlier post we talked about using the freeware Crystal Disk Mark we can measure how fast the hard drive. The same person who developed the freeware also wrote another hard drive utility, called Crystal Disk Info. It offers some unique features, such as it tells you how many hour your hard drive have been running, and how many times it has been turned on. (i.e. if you have never replaced a new hard drive it basically tells you how many times you have turned on your computer and how long you’ve been using it.)
There are also some other features it offers, such as it tells you the temperature of your hard drive, the type of the hard drive whether is STAT or IDE (from the Transfer Mode Attribute), the hard drive Serial Number (will be useful when warranty is covered) etc.
Another cool thing this application brings is that it gives you a measure of your hard drive Heath Status. As Jeff Atwood have suggested on coding horror
the hard drive is the most temperature sensitive device inside your computer
According to our research, increasing HDD temperature by 5 C has the same effect on reliability as switching from 10% to 100% HDD workload. Each one-degree drop of HDD temperature is equivalent to a 10% increase of HDD service life.
When your CPU, video card, or motherboard fails, you buy a new one and replace it. Big deal. Life goes on. But when your hard drive fails, unless you have a rigorous backup regime, you just lost all your data. Failure of a hard drive tends to have catastrophic consequences for your data.
So it is very important to keep an eye on your hard drive performance. Personally I have had experience in hard drive failure, believe me it is not something you want it to happen to you, and it is also something you can prevent.
If you are interested in all those data below, and what it means feel free to visits the S.M.A.R.T on wiki
Here in this case my laptop’s hard drive have been turned on 2793 times and have been running 4739 hours.
Download the Crystal Disk Info here
Wow, typo much?
this is embarrassing, thanks for pointing out
1559 “power on”
63160 Power On Hours! D:
And Still going strong after 15 years xD (+/-)
ST3250824AS 250GB Reported By tool
Misinformation.
The number of hours of use does NOT indicate the age of the hard drive -unless- it was on 24/7 from the time it was installed in the PC.
If a HD has 1000 of use on it but is 15 years old, it is more important to know the -real- age of the drive than the hours of use.
Is there an easy way to find how old hard drive is if you buy second hand