Is 23,000 hours of operation for a harddrive a lot?

[KingstonU]

My hard drive has been really noisy lately.

It's a Maxtor 6L200S0 200Gb/1Mb cache/SATA ~2 years old. It has 23,000 Power-On Hours, Is this a lot? It's also at 39'C. I got SeaTools diagnostics recommended from the Maxtor website and it passed all the tests including S.M.A.R.T., Short & Long Drive Self Test, Short & Long Generic Test.

It seems to be making more noise since I recently put my tower on it's side (because one of the damn push-pins came loose so I'll put it back up as soon as I get a bolt-through kit or something).

I would rather wait till SSDs become reasonable in price and reliability before buying a new one, but is this one showing signs that it is going to die shortly?

Thanks

 

[GaryJohnson]

Confusion... case on its side; was the drive making noise before the case was on its side? It sounds like you should get the case upright and see if the noise persists.

Is your concern losing data or having down time? If it's the former make backups, if it's the latter keep a replacement handy. Hard drives can fail without symptoms.