Hard Disk Drive HDD and Solid State Drives SSD SMART feature is not reliable

yes i dont trust smart cause hdd and ssds can fail smart dose not really help much i would use crystal disk info instead which i use

Ten years ago I went by the click of death. Occasionally, recently, I have gotten advance notice through Truenas reporting errors and I have replaced drives before failure, but it is worth the expense to replace rather than loose data.
Thanks for the video, I totally agree, SMART is not definitive, but it can help save you from data loss.

Some SSD manufactures include software to show the health of your SSD. Of course, hard drives can fail suddenly unlike SSD.

Over the years I noticed that most (about 90%) HDs come with SMART enabled, but automatic self-testing and logging disabled.
This means most peoples HDs don't notice they are failing, and any SMART tool will be showing obsolete error info.
Unless the user enables the self testing or does it manually on a schedule, the first thing they notice (as you point out) is the slowing of the drive, then if they are lucky Windows will show an error.
By that time it is usually in a very bad condition.

I would say SMART is worth while, but only if you enable self testing and saving logs (not all drives support that), but most importantly it needs to be backed up with actually running a SMART monitor tool that will notify you of changes in drive health.
Windows has no way to report SMART errors unless you add it, so simply enabling it in the drives isn't enough.

Weird noises from a drive is my indication!

When SMART says it's good, it might not be. When SMART says it's going bad, it's going bad.

All drives that failed for me had really concerning smart results, I'd say its highly reliable.

What would you recommend for disk testing otherwise? SpinRite? HDD Regen?