How SMART are you ?

[#1]

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART)
is a monitoring system for computer hard disk drives to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures.
I use an app called SMARTReporter on my iMacs, which monitor my HDD's, and also gives a Runtime from new.
I use this info in a Spreadsheet of mine.
For the iMac I mostly use, some times connected to the Internet, many times not.
Currently, I average 6.9 hours per 24 hour day !!!
( = SMART Lifetime Hours / Days iMac owned )

That does seem rather a lot though, the iMac is in Sleep mode a lot of the time.
Equivalent to 25p / hour based on purchase price.

Thinking about it, probably most of the time NOT on the Internet.
Rendering Video & Photo's, copying TV programmes to and from USB Sticks, Virus checking etc.
Downloading & updating software, and the occasional TV programme too,
BBC iPlayer etc, where I just Sleep the display and leave the iMac to it.....

[#2]

It's been over a year, probably over 1000 hours powered on, since the drive of mine that used up all its spare sectors failed according to its SMART data. Yet it still works about as well as it ever did.

[#3]

I always thought that smart data was handled by the OS for some reason. I never gave it a second thought that you could get a program to read it.. no idea why but it would seem logical lol.
I've had several hard drives decide to give off warning symptoms over the years. Only one ever really truly failed IMO (80gb drive - largest I had so I was a bit miffed). It started getting sluggish and was very slow to pull data off. When I formatted the drive and dumped some backups on it a few months later it seemed to be fine. Granted I've never really bothered using it much since but I was shocked that it seemed to come back from the dead. Maybe that OS had a virus or something..
I've also had some 40gb drives start making their head clicking sounds (some within warranty period too but I couldn't send them back as they were in use) but they've never totally failed. Also got a bufallo 500gb usb drive that did the same thing.. needless to say that doesn't get used much now either 
The main PC gets left on 24/7 at the moment and seems to cope rather well. It's an emachines too and we all know their reputation isn't great but it's been far more reliable than all our previous computers.

[#4]

Mine says 2.3 years powered on - but 5,000 power cycles!