is it possible to estimate the death time of a hdd?

is it possible to test a hard disk and predict when it will die on you (roughly)?

Solution 1:

While @Alex Howansky's answer made me chuckle endlessly, I think what you're really looking for is something like SMART diagnostic data, which is a predictive failure tool. Any modern drive that supports it will WARN you if it thinks something is wrong based on a pattern of small failures...major head crashes are still basically impossible to predict, though.

Solution 2:

The S.M.A.R.T. tools can help display drive health information, e.g.

sudo apt-get install smartmontools
smartctl -H -A /dev/sda
etc.

Solution 3:

Sure, your hard drive will die shortly after you hear "bzzzzzzzzzzz grrrr grrrr grrrr click click click DING" come from it.

Solution 4:

Not really. While it is possible to monitor some aspects and make predictions based on statistics, there are risk factors that can lead to instant failure without any warning. As the worst case scenario can strike at any time, I'd just plan around it, and not differentiate between failure modes.

So to guard against hardware failures, set up a RAID6 and swap harddisks if the controller tells you they are no longer usable; this protects reasonably well against typical failure modes (total unannounced loss of an entire disk and individual unreadable sectors on single disks), and for everything else (lightning strike, ...) there is your off-site backup.

I've since moved my entire storage at home to a single machine with 4 x 2 TB disks, which gives a net capacity of 4 TB, allows up to two disks to fail (this is an important feature, as statistically it is very likely for another disk to fail during a rebuild, and even single unreadable sectors count as failures if you have no redundancy left), and can easily be extended by adding more disks; move that to the broom closet and use diskless systems everywhere else, and receive a massive Spousal Acceptance Factor boost for future hardware purchases. :)