Is more actually more, or is it less?
A valid question! My antipathy for the mimalist SMART pass/fail is based on two different drives that failed completely, but based on an aggregate SMART score Disk Utility still reported the drives had passed SMART. On the other hand, TechTool Pro showed one or more SMART attributes that had exceeded the limits and were being reported as FAIL.
Even if manufacturers set more realistic pass/fail limits for the SMART attributes the minimalist score still would only tell you if the drive had failed, and you probably already know or at least suspect that is the case. Having all the attributes permits an informed user to anticipate impending failure and perhaps short stopping a McGillicuddy's corollary to Murphy's Law event. The fly in this ointment is the word "informed".
In the final analysis the additional information is useless if the user does not understand what the attributes are telling her/him. It would be possible for an app to apply AI techniques to analyze the data, but then they risk being sued by drive manufacturers for saying a drive had failed or is failing when, as in the case of the two drives I mentioned, it still passes the manufacturer's overly optimistic failure criteria.
In the meantime I wish there were an app that would check the SMART values at a user specified and report not only changes in the attribute values, but the rate of change in selected key values. That would truly indicate impending failure. (I think I will write Micromat and suggest this as a new feature for Drive Scope.
