Comment Abusing SMART makes it worthless (Score 1) 124
If you abuse SMART to pump out bullshit errors, that just makes people ignore SMART.
I remember when SMART was a new thing it was common for hard drives to incorrectly report potential failure messages, and "fancy" new PC BIOSes of the time would bitch and whine about it at each startup. The standard procedure was to test the drive out, make additional backups if needed, and if everything looked fine then just disable the damn thing to shut it up. Those drives never actually failed.
I have a tiny home file server with a couple of old WD 1TB drives. They have an absurd uptime, but spend almost all of their time spun down, and the entire things gets shut off when I know I won't be accessing it for a while.
Drives can last a long time when taken care of. Hell, I still have a Segate ST277R 65MB RLL hard drive that is working fine.