> We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors.
So basically, if you are getting SMART errors, you should make sure that data is backed up (if it isn't already).
Another interesting section is:
> Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count. In other words, models based only on those signals can never predict more than half of the failed drives.
So, while monitoring SMART errors is a good indicator if your drive is going to fail, it's hardly failsafe, and chances are you drive will fail without any notice. SMART stats are interesting, but not the ideal measure of the health of a disk.
[1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...