[estimator7292]

N=1, but I had a drive show catastrophic SMART failures once. I figured I'd take the opportunity to tinker with the exposed serial port on the drive's PCB and wiped the SMART values.

Funny thing was, I didn't actually observe any data loss. I stressed the drive for several days, no errors. It went back in my daily driver for the next 5 years with no failure. It's been 15 years since that happened and the drive still hasn't failed.

I don't trust SMART anymore.

[proactivesvcs]

I've known a fair few drives with uncorrectable sectors or adaptor warnings that continue to work but a lot more that have degraded or just outright failed.