The author doesn’t explicitly call out the classic reliability engineer’s concept of a bathtub failure model. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve http

The author doesn’t explicitly call out the classic reliability engineer’s concept of a bathtub failure model. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve Thermal abuse (running at a high temp for many hours), duty cycle, iop rate (high head acceleration versus head dwell) all impact the lifetime. Early life media issues are predictive of failure and can be detected through stress testing with various seek ranges. It’s not as simple as a SMART metric, but did appear to have predictive value. The one experiment I ran discovered a set of drives which ultimately the manufacturer admitted to a since corrected process problem. The above factors are different on each drive family and can’t normally be generalized.