How bad are my HDD's situation?

Solution
Neither of them looks especially alarming to me (see below for more detailed commentary), although you should always make sure you have recent backups of anything important - any drive, old or new, could fail at any time without warning.

If you've got money for an upgrade, perhaps now would be a good time to think about retiring them gracefully in favour of an SSD - you'll wonder how you ever put up with hard-drive performance.

If you're thinking of using either of them in a new PC, though, don't. Quite apart from any reliability concerns, they'll be a major performance bottleneck. They're not very big by today's standards [edit: see below] so they wouldn't be terribly useful for bulk storage of media, etc.

[Edit] I've just looked up...

molletts

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Neither of them looks especially alarming to me (see below for more detailed commentary), although you should always make sure you have recent backups of anything important - any drive, old or new, could fail at any time without warning.

If you've got money for an upgrade, perhaps now would be a good time to think about retiring them gracefully in favour of an SSD - you'll wonder how you ever put up with hard-drive performance.

If you're thinking of using either of them in a new PC, though, don't. Quite apart from any reliability concerns, they'll be a major performance bottleneck. They're not very big by today's standards [edit: see below] so they wouldn't be terribly useful for bulk storage of media, etc.

[Edit] I've just looked up the model number for the Samsung one; it's actually quite big - 2TB (I assumed that it was a similar era to the WD one which I recognised as 160GB - that'll teach me to do my research properly) - so you could use it for media storage.

The WD one is showing signs of age - it has over 40,000 hours power-on time (but it's only recorded 1,734 power cycles so I guess you are probably in the habit of leaving the PC running for long periods rather than turning it on and off all the time - I've seen drives with more power cycles than hours!) so the 7 reallocated sectors aren't too surprising; indeed, I've had brand-new drives show more than that after the multi-pass read/write media test I always do before using a drive (I'm paranoid). None of the flagged attributes is anywhere near the failure threshold. 197 indicates that the drive is waiting for an opportunity to reallocate another sector - it'll probably get done next time that sector is written to. I'd keep an eye on the reallocated sector count - if it starts to go up suddenly, that's a bad sign. Likewise, if you observe any symptoms of drive failure such as unexplained "pauses" while accessing it or repeated, rhythmic clicking noises, that should sound alarm bells for you.

The Samsung one is relatively "youthful" - it only shows 6,300 hours power-on time, although it has logged 1,079 power cycles. (Were the drives in different PCs at one time, or has your usage pattern changed over time?) The spin-up time has exceeded (well, dropped below) the "fail" threshold which suggests that maybe the spindle motor or bearings are wearing. Quite why, after so few hours, is puzzling but I've had spin-up-related problems with Samsung drives before - we had a whole suite of PCs with them at the first school where I worked and, after my first summer there, quite a few were stuck come September after being off for 6 weeks. I had to take the drives out and whack them "rotationally" on the desk to free the spindles (note: not a manufacturer-approved procedure!)

Stephen

[Edit: clarify my ramblings a bit]
 
Solution

molletts

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One power cycle simply means the drive being powered-on to it being powered-off again. (Although "power-cycling" something usually refers to doing the reverse - turning it off then on again.) The drive will, of course, log a power cycle as soon as it starts up - it can't log one after the cycle completes because the power will be off by that time! :)

So, dividing the number of powered-on hours (the raw data, which is shown in hexadecimal in the screenshot) by the number of power cycles (again, the raw data) gives the average number of hours the drive was "on" at a time, which gives a good clue about the type of usage it has had: drives used in server-type roles tend to have high hours and low power-cycle count because they tend to run 24/7; office-type desktops often have somewhere near 8 hours per cycle; casually-used home laptops may be on for only an hour or two at a time.

You have to use the "raw" data rather than the "values" for this because the values are generated by the drive's firmware by comparing the raw data with manufacturer-specified numbers - a "normal" value for something like the spin-up time, an expected lifetime for power-on hours, etc. They start at a high value and go down as the measured or counted raw data gets "worse". When they drop below the threshold value, the attribute is considered to be "failing". The drive will record the worst value it's ever seen as well as reporting the current one.
 

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