Comment Re:Top #1 Indicator That Correlates To Drive Failu (Score 1) 142
If you go by Google's definition of failing (the raw value of any of Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Current_Pending_Sector, or Offline_Uncorrectable goes non-zero) rather than the SMART definition of failing (any scaled value goes below the "failure threshold" value defined in the drive's firmware), about 40% of drive failures can be predicted with an acceptably low false-positive rate. You're correct, though, that the "SMART health assessment" is useless as a predictor of failure.
They did a study on this a few years back. It comes to about the same conclusions that Backblaze's study does, but with more numbers (and a larger data set).