hi, this is a question not a problem ( yet)

i left out the other info cause it would give away the POH

i'm aware of:

"Most newer hard drives are good for 600,000 load cycles. In practice, you can usually do more, but the risk of hard drive failure is significantly increased."

( Googled showed me (too) many topics )

I read many topics about the SMART , but i am curious what would be the first thought when looking at the loads

i also read these value are critical: SMART5 SMART 187 SMART188 SMART 197 SMART 198
(doesn't mean i i really understan how it works, but do know now which ones to watch.

drives in random order not 'sorted' by poh and/or age

Load Cycle Count 6,204

Load Cycle Count 1,774

Load Cycle Count 9.739

okay, no replies ?

well here is a hint : the answer for 9.739 : 1318d 7h or approx: 3.6 years ( year counted as 365 days that is)
removed because of too many smart 200 errors.

Now it should be a lot easier to estimate poh (and the number of days) for the other drives

How fast HDD load / unload (head parking) increment can vary according to drive (eg, mobile 2.5" "green" drives will park the head more aggressively than 3.5" 7,200rpm "black" drives). It's also possible to disable "head parking" on many drives (or increase the timeout from 5 seconds to nearer 5 minutes which drastically slows down the rate of increase), using utilities such as wdidle3.exe (for WD drives) or changing the "APM" settings with HDDScan. HDD death of old age from HDD head parking cycles really shouldn't be a problem given you can actually change / disable it on many drives.

Thanks for the fast reply , i guess you know it was about a WD hdd ?
green seems to be gone, and WD made green the current blue , so unfortunetaly i've been had ( or whatever the expression is when a person has been fooled)

I knew Green WD were 'bad' so i avoided them, like almost everyone but it seems many people weren't aware the new Blue have the 'agressive' head parking, i reas about wdidle3 , and it seems to work for manybut not all wd blue, they alo mentioned it might invalidate warranty...

Thanks again for the reply, i dont want to invalidate my 2 year warranty so i guess i cross my fingers and hope it doesnt mess up before the 5 years are past which is the avg life a drive should at least have my old ST was 5 years and some monts ( 400 gb so an old decent drive, little space lots of noise from the start but it did itd job and had no error 200 :D so it wasnt bad at all.

My wd external book is long gone , so i m not that confident with wd anymore, the small external drive also wd have also a reasonable high load, the good thing is they are for storage only( many people claim BLUE is best for storage and not for gaming , even simple games do write a lot of data)

Anyway... i am a little disapointed in WD the way they just 'rebranded' the green ( which they stopped making) as the new blue with the same 8 second parking which is awfull...)

I have one LaCie external hard-drive, you guys are not going to believe me, but it is 20 years old and still working perfectly well. I love it. It's my only tech-relic of the past! :D

Check out this one I have:

The 193 Load/Unload Cycle Count SMART attribute is not a very good indicator for the age or health of a hard drive. Laptop drives unload their heads very often, so they'll have high numbers for SMART 193. I have a laptop drive, which runs perfectly fine, with 1646 days Power on time and around 500000 load/unload cycles.

Hard Disk Sentinel is another program which can change the APM settings or disable the spin down of disks.

SMART is not reliable.
Many HDDs die before SMART make a warniing.

thanks for the reply... i know about HD Sentinel and it's use, the developer gives lot's of info regarding the SMART...
i las know many SMART atrributes that do the same have different names, which only ads more confusion, it would hve been better if they used one format instead of trying to reinvent the wheel :D yup, also read many articles about that too, so basically its like what they often say in some cartoons / movies : " Son ... you're on your own :D ... if it comes to SMART.

I know WD is notorious regarding its green HDD which its 'removed; and now all current BLUE HDD have the dreaded 8 sec. park.... my old hdd never had as many cycles in their entire lifespan ... ( samsung , ST, Maxtor ...

Anyway the old HDD were 'larger' looked more sturdy, had less space 200 to 500 GB instead of 1 TB 2 TB 3 TB and so on :D, they were more expensive compared to todays HDD, they were not replaced cause by the time need to i had a new PC .

Anyway, this topic can be closed cause i have the information i was looking for, i havent selected any answer as solution cause they were all helpfull so i can't select one...

thanks for the help ...