Anyone who mentions SMART and reliability in the one sentence isn't worth reading - sorry OP.

I hve had bazillions of drives with a perfect SMART - which were unusable, and mamy others which had SMART throwing OSHA at me - yet they worked for decades, literally.

iirc i address this in a footnote --- absence of SMART errors has very little predictive power, presence has slightly more but it depends which errors they are and how they accumulate