You should see what some of the other alternatives do. I just decommissioned a server and pulled the drives out of it. One of them had SMART data indicating tha

You should see what some of the other alternatives do. I just decommissioned a server and pulled the drives out of it. One of them had SMART data indicating that it reached the "drive failing, replace now" stage six months prior. The hardware RAID controller in the server had been content to give no indication of this at all. Had another one where the drives were in two external containers and one of them lost power for a moment. The hardware RAID controller thereby marked that half of the drives as failed. This was too many failures to run the array, but it also had no mechanism to assemble an array using the perfectly operational drives it had marked as failed, so that was a restore from backup. Meanwhile mdadm now supports --write-journal which moots the only real advantage hardware RAID ever held.