How to get total running time of a hard disk
Answer based on comments from @Zoredache:
Command is smartctl --all /dev/sdc
and the section to look under is "Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds", which has an attribute named "Power_On_Hours".
So command for just getting power on hours (runnning) is:
smartctl --all /dev/sdc | grep Power_On_Hours
Which can then show something like:
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 087 087 000 Old_age Always - 10171
The running time is thus: 10171 hours