Disk is likely to fail soon

Question

How much time can I expect this disk (1 TB) to function? I have already made a backup of my important data. But I will be unable to buy a new HDD until February. Is there any way I can extend its life? Perhaps by formatting the disk or something else?

Solution

There is no precise time, it could be a minute from now or a month from now. But if it's bound to happen it will and you can't really prolong the disk's life, so make sure you backed up all and stop relying on it.

Comments

[phk]

This is pretty much the saw SMART info so this isn't Linux/Unix specific.

[Julie Pelletier]

Unless you know a really good psychic, only time will tell. It is on the verge of failing and that's all you'll know until it does.

[Alex Stragies]

The disk has already reallocated ~150MiB of Data to spare sectors. You might not want to bet on the total number of spares available. The drive will then stop working, or may become eternally read-only.

[saladi]

Can I run the laptop using portable USB 2.0 stick after my hard disk crashes just for basic stuff like using Internet etc.?

[schaiba]

Yup, use a live image and write it to the stick.

[jayhendren]

One of my coworkers (a Linux sysadmin) worked off a live usb for a few months after his hard drive failed. He couldn't shut down his system without the risk of losing all his work, since the filesystem lives only in memory on a live USB. I still have no idea how (or why) he managed that. Working like that would drive me crazy. Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is that you can certainly use a computer with no storage and only a live image, but at the risk of losing your sanity.

[Lonnie Best]

How does it detect that the "DISK IS LIKELY TO FAIL SOON"? Does it do some measure of performance and (based on that) predict imminent failure?