Johan Grönqvist:
I read about smartmontools on "debian package a day", and tried it out.
Running "smartctl -A /dev/sda" on my recent laptop (bought it this
spring) gave me 8 times pre-fail and 15 times old_age.
You are misreading the output. The words "pre-fail" and "old_age" are
just descriptions of the attribute they are listed at.
Generally, you only have to look at two columns, value and threshold. As
long as value is below threshold, everything is fine. The numbers in
these columns have been defined by the manufacturer and you can trust
them most of the time. The "raw" value doesn't reveal usable information
except for a few attributes (like temperature, reallocated sectors,
power on time and maybe some others).
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
-- snip
I think your disk is fine but a temperature of 54°C might shorten its
lifetime. Installing an additional fan might be a good idea.