Besides stock management, they help use determine the overall health of a Storage Pod or Vault. They also help find trouble with other components. For example

Besides stock management, they help use determine the overall health of a Storage Pod or Vault. They also help find trouble with other components. For example, if a backplane or cable were failing, the drives via their SMART stats may notice first. So they SMART stats are part of what we use to evaluate the whole system health.