High 'Command Timeout' from S.M.A.R.T data? Will my hard drive fail soon?

[curioususer123]

I'm worried about my S.M.A.R.T data for two of my drives, they have been running a while now and I bought them second hand. I noticed the command timeout value is really high, I read up that this may be due to a poor PSU or a loose/oxidised SATA cable, I rechecked my cables and they were completely new, I fastened them just to make sure - I even replaced the cable for the hard drive below, but the command timeout remained the same afterwards.

I have a new hard drive that shows a command timeout value of '1', I've read in multiple places that it should be 0, so to have it anything but - or even hundreds of thousands times higher, is quite worrying. The new drive also has a power-off retract count of 8, what does this mean?

I'd also like to ask about start/stop and power cycle count, I hear these can make your drive fail, which may be a problem since I put my computer to sleep a lot - does this add to the counts?

Attribute name Real value Current Worst Threshold Raw Value Status
01 Read Error Rate 0 119 99 6 000C3A4F23 Good
03 Spin-Up Time 0 ms 100 100 0 0000000000 Good
04 Start/Stop Count 1,190 99 99 20 00000004A6 Good
05 Reallocated Sectors Count 0 100 100 36 0000000000 Good
07 Seek Error Rate 0 71 60 30 0001B33199 Good
09 Power-On Hours (POH) 338d 9h 91 91 0 0000001FB9 Good
0A Spin Retry Count 0 100 100 97 0000000000 Good
0C Device Power Cycle Count 1,163 99 99 20 000000048B Good
B7 SATA Downshift Error Count 0 100 100 0 0000000000 Good
B8 End-to-End error / IOEDC 0 100 100 99 0000000000 Good
BB Reported Uncorrectable Errors 0 100 100 0 0000000000 Good
BC Command Timeout 327,695 100 99 0 000005000F Good
BD High Fly Writes (WDC) 0 100 100 0 0000000000 Good
BE Airflow Temperature 30 °C 70 51 45 00231A001E Good
C2 Temperature 30 °C 30 49 0 000000001E Good
C3 Hardware ECC Recovered 0 29 14 0 000C3A4F23 Good
C5 Current Pending Sector Count 0 100 100 0 0000000000 Good
C6 Uncorrectable Sector Count 0 100 100 0 0000000000 Good
C7 UltraDMA CRC Error Count 0 200 200 0 0000000000 Good
F0 Head Flying Hours 468d 7h 100 253 0 0000002BE7 Good
F1 Total LBAs Written 648,474,519 100 253 0 0026A6EF97 Good
F2 Total LBAs Read 1,870,282,054 100 253 0 006F7A3D46 Good

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there curioususer123,

I want to start with that your new HDD is most probably fine. You can test it with some brand specific software and see whether it will get a passing grade anyway. Load Cycle Count counts the times heads are loaded onto the media and Power Off Retract Count counts the times heads are loaded off the media.

Regarding your second hand drive, I think that this isn't the real Command Timeout value: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/295448-32-very-high-command-timeout. On the other hand, it seems that it doesn't have any bad sectors on it. My advice would be just to use the drive but don't store crucial data on it(given the fact it is second hand).
The Power Cycle Count is pretty much self explanatory. It means how many power on/off cycles the HDD had.
The Start/Stop Count is again informative value that shouldn't be a crucial one.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD