Quote:
The only way to know for sure about impending drive failures is to watch the S.M.A.R.T. data from smartctl.

I've had several Maxtor drives just fall over and die even when SMART thinks everything is okay. None of the thresholds had been reached and the worst values were still high. In fact I've never had any advanced warning through SMART. The one time it actually passed one of the thresholds, the drive was already dead.